Abstract
During the planning stages of any communication or com mand/control system utilizing satellites, it is necessary to examine the ground-terminal/satellite geometry for many proposed configurations in order to find the one most suitable. By "most suitable," I mean the configuration exhibiting the greatest ground-terminal-to-satellite acces sibility as demonstrated by a maximum time-in-view.
The procedures I describe in this paper provide a means for rapidly generating ground terminal/satellite visibility records via an analog computer simulation of the Earth's surface/satellite orbit geometry. The analog simulation has several significant advantages relative to similar digital computer approaches-(1) it is significantly faster (easily 15,000 times real-time) and less expensive to operate; (2) the output, ink-on-paper strip-chart recordings, is directly interpretable without further data reduction; (3) system parameter changes are readily introduced while a simula tion is in progress; (4) the Systems Analyst can maintain a decidedly greater rapport with his configuration analysis. The disadvantages are: (1) diminished accuracy, and (2) exclusion of Earth/orbit non-linearities and anomalies—in a real-time tracking or scheduling simulation, these dis advantages are serious; in a systems analysis tool such as this time-in-view simulation, they are not of great con sequence.
I have devoted the first five sections of this paper to a description of the development of the vector-matrix model underlying the simulation. The sixth section describes the mechanization of the model using an electronic analog computer.
The equations from which the computer potentiometer settings are derived are quite tedious to manipulate man ually—even aided by a desk calculator. In an appendix, I describe the simple digital computer (in my case, a RE- COMP II) program used to obtain the desired potentiom eter settings.
It strikes me that, while lack of simultaneity in the usage of the analog and digital machines precludes the use of the word hybrid, we may validly coin the expression "syner getic computing" to describe this simulation.
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