Accuracy Ranging Technology Research Between Formation Flying Small Satellites

Formation flying is one of the best application methods of the small satellites, along with the increasingly maturation of the modern small satellite technology, the satellite formation flying show up increasing advantages compared with the traditional satellite technology. It could complete some mission that tradition couldn't. Its advantages mainly represents in the aspect that low in cost, and wonderful in performance, high reliability and flexible. So it's necessary and urgent to develop the inter-satellite technology of our country. While the realization of the high precision range measurement is the main block of the development of the formation flying technology.The ranging between the formation flying satellites have these flying environment characters and requires: comparatively low Doppler and multiple-object between satellites; autonomous navigation between two satellites, and don't seek the land TT&C station to participated in. It requires the TT&C system has the advantage of short in observation time, and high precision ranging.By discussing the advantages and disadvantages of each measure system and measure method, we decide adopt the wireless to measure, and the ranging system is two-way transmit. This article also researched two main parts in the receiver: acquisition and tracking, and lodged adaptive double thresholds acquisition algorithm based on the constant false alarm rate. Tracking take the code delay locking loop and costas loop to demodulation the message, then obtained the double frequency ranging signal contain ambiguity, ranged by double frequency smoothed PN code for ambiguity resolution, thus accurately measure used by carrier phase, while using the PN code to resolute the ambiguity of the difference frequency, then the difference frequency is used to resolute the ambiguity of carrier frequency. This method conquered the problem which low in precision ranged by PN code, and measured by carrier phase couldn't get ambiguity, consequently realize the accuracy satellite-to-satellite ranging. Lastly, we utilize the simulation software systemview made the model according as the ranging method lodge by this article.