SOURCEFORGE » RALF » 2015 Building blocks for a LEO ground station

h1. State of Art of the Orbit Propagators

Orbit propagators are mathematical models made to estimate the satellite’s position and velocity. These models take into account the effects which perturbate the satellite from his ideal orbit. These perturbations are mostly the result of the non-spherical earth mass distribution, the atmospheric resistance and gravitation effects from the sun or the moon.

Five of these propagators exist : SGP, SGP4, SDP4, SGP8 and SDP8. SGP means Simplified General Perturbations models and SDP means Simplified Deep Space Perturbations. Here is a short description for each of these propagators :

    SGP is the first orbit propagator. It has been developed by Hilton and Kuhlman in 1966 thanks to Kozai research work made in 1959. It is made for satellite orbiting near the Earth which considers satellite with an orbital period lower than 225 minutes.

    SGP4 has been developed by Ken Cranford in 1970. It is a improvement of the previous propogator in order to track the growing number of satellites in orbit at this time. It is also used for near Earth satellites.

    SDP4, developed by Hujsak in 1979, is the SGP4 propagator adpated for deep space objects. This consider satellites with an orbital period greater than 225 minutes.

    SGP8, also used for near Earth satellites, is almost like the SGP4 propogator but the calculation methods are different. However it follows the same models for the atmospheric and gravitational effects.

    SDP8 is the SGP8 propagator adpated to deep-space effects. Moreover, SGP8 and SDP8 are better to manage the orbital decay.

In this project, we chose to use the SGP4 orbit propagator. On one hand because we are dealing with low orbit satellites and on the other hand because this propagator is the most commonly use to develop satellite stracking software. Besides, the NORAD (North American Aerospace Defence Command) element sets are provided using SGP4 or SDP4. Thus it is more accurate to implement one of these propagator.