A BEIDOU Short Message Based Method for Position Information Distribution of Reentry Vehicles

The traditional reentry vehicles, including recoverable satellites, vehicles for deep space mission and manned spacecrafts, utilize the way of transmitting typical beacon signals to the ground part to realize positioning. However, it usually takes long time for seeking as only direction information is available, which may push the risk to a high level. In this paper, a novel method depending on BEIDOU short message communication is proposed. Firstly, the reentry vehicles are capable of acquiring self-position information by receiving and analyzing signals from GPS or BEIDOU system. After that, BEIDOU short message communication chain is utilized to broadcast the accurate position information to the ground. Compared with the traditional method, the efficiency of seeking procedure will be significantly improved as more accurate position information is now available. Meanwhile, the risk of seeking will be reduced as well. The paper consists of three parts. In the first part, the whole information flow including the space part and the ground part is introduced. Then, the design of the system and the key instruments onboard is illustrated, as well as the feasibility in a typical application. At last, the verification results of the method proposed in an experiment are displayed. By comparing with the traditional method, the prospects and potential applications are concluded.