Abstract: There are an amount of visible windows between the satellite and the satellite group station. Only within the visible windows, the satellite group station can directly observe and operate the satellite. Therefore, it’s an important issue that how to schedule the resources of group station reasonably to get the maximum usable time of visible windows. In this issue, the visible windows between the satellite and the satellite group station are defined as task set. The ant colony algorithm is applied to construct effective task scheduling sequence, to get the maximum execution time of tasks which means the maximum usable time of the visible windows. The experimental data show that with the ant colony algorithm can get excellent scheduling results, while these scheduling results are also better than the FCFS’s and the greedy algorithm. It can be seen, the algorithm can effectively solve the mission planning of satellite ground stations.

Key words: ant colony algorithm, satellite ground station, mission plan