Integrated method for measuring distance and time difference between small satellites

• 作者: ZHU Yaowei XU Zhaobin JIN Xiaojun GUO Xiaoxu JIN Zhonghe
• 来源期刊: 系统工程与电子技术（英文版）
• 年，卷（期）: 2021,（3）
• 所属期刊栏目: SYSTEMS ENGINEERING
• 页码范围: 596-606
• 页数: 11页
• 语种: 英文
• DOI: 10.23919/JSEE.2021.000051

摘要

The advancement of small satellites is promoting the development of distributed satellite systems,and for the latter,it is essential to coordinate the spatial and temporal relations between mutually visible satellites.By now,dual one-way ran-ging(DOWR)and two-way time transfer(TWTT)are generally in-tegrated in the same software and hardware system to meet the limitations of small satellites in terms of size,weight and power(SWaP)consumption.However,studies show that pseudo-noise regenerative ranging(PNRR)performs better than DOWR if some advanced implementation technologies are employed.Besides,PNRR has no requirement on time synchronization.To apply PNRR to small satellites,and meanwhile,meet the demand for time difference measurement,we propose the round-way time difference measurement,which can be combined with PNRR to form a new integrated system without exceeding the limits of SWaP.The new integrated system can provide distributed small satellite systems with on-orbit high-accuracy and high-precision distance measurement and time difference measurement in real time.Experimental results show that the precision of ranging is about 1.94 cm,and that of time difference measurement is about 78.4 ps,at the signal to noise ratio of 80 dBHz.