In source localization system, micro and nano satellites are often used as distributed network to complete the task. This paper proposed a rotating triangular tethered satellite formation which has fewer station maintenance costs and superior reliability to maintain the geometry. Likewise, it can achieve high-resolution localization accuracy with short baseline resulted from rotating itself. In this paper, we investigate the source localization performance of tethered satellite formation by comparing with the traditional formation and the influences of TDOA, FDOA and RFDOA on localization accuracy are also analyzed. Simulation and experiment results demonstrate that the proposed localization system has better performance than traditional one and takes on an approximately linear relationship between period of rotation and accuracy.
['Shangyu Zhang', 'Zhen Huang', 'Dexiu Hu']
Investigation on source localization performance using rotating tethered satellite formation