A Kriging Based Framework for Rapid Satellite-to-Site Visibility Determination

Rapid satellite-to-site visibility determination is of great significance to coverage analysis of satellite constellations as well as onboard mission planning of autonomous spacecraft. A Kriging interpolation technique based framework for rapid visibility determination is proposed in this paper. Kriging is an advanced geostatistical procedure that generates an estimated surface from a scattered set of points. The idea is introduced in the paper to determine the rise and set times of visibility, where the estimation errors are controlled by weighted surrounding measurement values. To further increase the computational speed, an interval shrinking strategy preprocessing is adopted via investigating the geometric relationship between the ground viewing cone and the orbit trajectory. The proposed algorithm can be widely applied to all orbital types and orbit propagators. Several experiments are conducted with different Kriging surrogate functions, and the simulation results indicate that the proposed method outperforms the brute force and other interpolation methods.