Research on Beaconless Spatial Acquisition for Optical Inter-Satellite Communication

Beaconless spatial acquisition contribute a lot to designing a more integrated and smaller laser communication terminal for optical inter-satellite communication. In this paper, we present an analytical model of beaconless spatial acquisition on the influence of vibration. Two kinds of scan methods are analyzed, which are single scan and multi-scan. The analytical expressions of the acquisition probability of single scan and the mean acquisition time of multi-scan are derived. Numerical simulation and Monte Carlo experiment are adopted. The simulation results show that the acquisition probability of single scan asymptotically approaches a constant value with the increase of vibration levels and becomes higher if the beam divergence is increased, but the scan beam gain decrease at the same time. So, the overall acquisition link margin should be sufficient when increasing the beam divergence. What's more, the accurate location of the target satellite has a great influence on the acquisition probability. When it comes to the multi-scan mode, the shortest mean acquisition time is got at the vibration level of 40 mu rad. And, the increase of multi-scan times can overcome the influence of vibration efficiently. The conclusions above can give some guides to the design of beaconless spatial acquisition system.