Abstract: Satellite constellation is widely used in environmental monitoring, geographical mapping and other remote sensing applications. Ground-trace distribution of satellites in a constellation should be well designed so as to achieve better performance such as less revisit time to targets and longer access interval to ground stations. At present, accurate and useful method for the optimization and adjustment of groundtrace distribution is still lacking because of the soaring amount of calculation with increasing number of satellites and the coupling of requirements to be considered. In order to solve the optimization problem of ground trace distribution of remote sensing satellite constellation in regression Sunsynchronous orbit, an accurate and comprehensive method based on a “revisit-circle” was proposed. The simulation results show that this method can simultaneously consider satellite phase retention and coverage performance under a unified framework, and that it can provide an intuitive and effective solution to the optimization of multi-target coverage performance, which can be used for satellite constellation design and performance adjustment of on-orbit satellite constellation.

Key words: nominal ground trace, revisit-circle, phase between satellites, regression orbit, satellite constellation