Site Selection to Improve the Chinese Observation Network for Spacecraft Phase Referencing Imaging

Phase referencing imaging is a method newly used to determine the position of a spacecraft. But the bad (u, v) coverage formed by Chinese observation stations affects its real time performance due to the lack of stations. To improve the observation network, firstly, this paper established the relationship between the station configuration and the image obtained from the phase referencing technique. Then, two site selection schemes were proposed and corresponding simulations have been conducted. The results show that the new sites selected by our method can generate much better (u, v) coverage and the position deamination of the spacecraft with one minute observation is possible.