Orbital Maneuver Strategy for Multitarget Overflight with Field-of-View Capability

Satellites with field-of-view (FOV) coverage and orbital maneuver capabilities can efficiently perform responsive successive overflight observations for multiple ground targets. However, these two capabilities have not been fully exploited together, resulting in either excessive fuel costs without FOV coverage or prolonged waiting times without orbital maneuvers. This study considers both capabilities simultaneously. First, the mapping method is introduced to characterize complete FOV observation windows. Then, the multitarget successive overflight problem is converted into an outer and inner dual-layer framework, where the outer layer optimizes observation window sequences and the inner layer optimizes overflight positions within these windows. The inner layer is further formulated as a multistage decision problem and solved by dynamic programming, which guarantees optimality in the discrete sense. Finally, three scenarios are compared with the existing exact overflight mode (without FOV capability). The results indicate that the FOV coverage capability significantly reduces the fuel cost for successive overflight observations. For a typical LEO satellite with an FOV of distance 40 km, the fuel cost of a 10-target overflight is reduced by more than 87%. Monte Carlo validation with 50 random target sets shows average fuel cost reductions of 89% and 90% for the impulse and low-thrust maneuver modes, respectively.