Relative and Absolute Station-Keeping for Two-Dimensional–Lattice Flower Constellations

FLOWERconstellations present beautiful and interesting dynamical features that allow exploration of a wide range of potential applications, such as telecommunications, Earth and deep space observation, global positioning systems, and distributed space systems. The flower constellations theory [1–3] was developed in 2004 by Professor Mortari. A flower constellation (FC) is a set of satellites following the same trajectories with respect to a rotating frame of reference. It includes the classicWalker constellations [4] but without the necessity of having circular orbits. This FC theory was substantially improved by the two-dimensional (2-D) lattice flower constellations (2-D–LFCs) [5], making the theory independent of any reference frame (inertial or rotating) and achieving a minimal parametrization.