Abstract
Recently, formation flying of small satellites is recognized as an important future on-orbit technology. It has many potentials such as realizing unlimited aperture size for radio sensing missions or spontaneous sensing at multiple points, leading to flexibility of space mission, low cost, tolerance against single satellite failure, and easier system upgrade, etc. However, usually the member satellites should be kept in a coordinated way, which requires lots of fuel. The orbital control methods requiring little fuel consumption should be developed. This paper focuses on J2 perturbation as a disturbance to the formation keeping. First, it is made clear why the formation is dispersed under the J2 perturbation. And then two new methods to keep the formation on a low earth orbit with small fuel consumption are proposed which are evaluated in computer simulations.
