Satellite Constellation Cooperative Revisit Scheduling Based on Observation Opportunities

Emergency revisit missions often require satellite constellations to cooperatively observe a target under limited maneuver resources. To address this problem, a satellite constellation cooperative revisit scheduling method based on rapidly generated observation opportunities is proposed. The scheduling problem is reformulated as a series of observation sequence determination problems under different revisit requirements. To efficiently generate candidate observation sequences, a scale-estimation-guided beam search is developed to estimate the sequence scale of observation opportunities rather than relying solely on accumulated maneuver cost. Consequently, the proposed framework enables a comprehensive evaluation of revisit performance, response capability, and maneuver cost. Simulation results validate the effectiveness of the proposed scheduling method, and reduced-instance comparisons are designed to evaluate the quality loss introduced by beam pruning. For each given revisit requirement, high-quality candidate schedules can be generated within 64 s. For the revisit scenario with a maximum revisit interval of 80 min, the minimum response time is 0.4890 day, while the corresponding total maneuver cost is only 180 m/s.