In order to effectively defend against the threats of the hypersonic gliding vehicles (HGVs), HGVs should be tracked as early as possible, which is beyond the capability of the ground-based radars. Being benefited by the developing mega-constellations in low-Earth orbit, this paper proposes a relay tracking mode to track HGVs to overcome the above problem. The whole tracking mission is composed of several tracking intervals with the same duration. Within each tracking interval, several appropriate satellites are dispatched to track the HGV. Satellites that are planned to take part in the tracking mission are selected by a new derived observability criterion. The tracking performances of the proposed tracking mode and the other two traditional tracking modes, including the stare and track-rate modes, are compared by simulation. The results show that the relay tracking mode can track the whole trajectory of a HGV, while the stare mode can only provide a very short tracking arc. Moreover, the relay tracking mode achieve higher tracking accuracy with fewer attitude controls than the track-rate mode.

中文翻译：

---

通过低轨巨型星座在中继跟踪模式下准确跟踪高超音速滑翔飞行器

为了有效防御高超声速滑翔飞行器（HGV）的威胁，需要尽早跟踪高超声速滑翔飞行器，这超出了地面雷达的能力。受益于近地轨道巨型星座的发展，本文提出一种跟踪HGV的中继跟踪模式来克服上述问题。整个跟踪任务由多个具有相同持续时间的跟踪间隔组成。在每个跟踪间隔内，都会派遣几颗适当的卫星来跟踪 HGV。计划参与跟踪任务的卫星是根据新的衍生可观测性标准来选择的。通过仿真比较了所提出的跟踪模式和其他两种传统跟踪模式（包括凝视模式和跟踪速率模式）的跟踪性能。结果表明，中继跟踪模式可以跟踪HGV的整个轨迹，而凝视模式只能提供很短的跟踪弧。此外，与跟踪速率模式相比，中继跟踪模式以更少的姿态控制实现了更高的跟踪精度。