A constellation design method for forest fire monitoring

Forest fires are one of the most sudden, destructive, and difficult-to-manage natural disasters. To effectively prevent the hazards caused by forest fires, it is necessary to conduct wildfire monitoring in forested areas. In response to the specific needs of wildfire monitoring in designated regions, this paper proposes a method for the design of an elliptical critical sun-synchronous return orbit constellation. First, by considering the characteristics of the monitoring region, the advantages of using an elliptical critical sun-synchronous return orbit are analyzed, and the orbital elements of the constellation's reference orbit are determined. Then, taking into account environmental perturbations and coverage characteristics, the configuration of the elliptical critical sun-synchronous return orbit constellation is designed. Based on this, using satellite constellation coverage and revisit period as performance metrics, an improved multi-objective particle swarm optimization (MOPSO) algorithm is employed to optimize the constellation configuration. Finally, for the forest fire monitoring mission in the Qinling Mountains, a case study is conducted, providing the specific orbital elements and configuration of the constellation. The results demonstrate that the constellation design meets the expected coverage performance metrics.