数字孪生卫星:概念,关键技术及应用

The development and application of New generation Information Technology (New IT) has brought new development trends and new demands for future satellite industry. How to employ and integrate the New IT into satellite engineering and industry to meet this trends and development is a key issue. Meanwhile, the needs for enhancing the capability of overall management and process control in large satellite projects and promoting the transformation and upgrading of satellite industry to be more digitalized, networked, intelligent and service-oriented are increasing. Therefore, digital twin, a new technology which can be integrated and fused with most New IT (including cloud computing, Internet of things, big data, artificial intelligence, 5G, etc.), was employed and introduced into satellite industry (including key stages, key scenarios and key entities), and a novel concept of Digital Twin Satellite (DTS) was proposed and studied. The composition of DTS was analyzed from the spatial dimension, including DTS experimental verification system, DTS assembly shop-floor, DTS product, and DTS network. Then the core elements of DTS were illustrated from the time dimension, including model thread, data thread, and service thread. The key technologies of DTS were put forward. The applications of DTS in different stages were discussed from the life cycle dimension, including satellite overall design, detailed design, production and manufacturing (including general assembly, integration and testing), on-orbit service and health management, network operation and maintenance management. It is expected this study can provide references for satellite industry development and satellite engineering construction in the future.