  Rapid satellite-to-site visibility determination is of great significance to
coverage analysis of satellite constellations as well as onboard mission
planning of autonomous spacecraft. This paper presents a novel self-adaptive
Hermite interpolation technique for rapid satellite-to-site visibility
determination. Piecewise cubic curves are utilized to approximate the waveform
of the visibility function versus time. The fourth-order derivative is used to
control the approximation error and to optimize the time step for
interpolation. The rise and set times are analytically obtained from the roots
of cubic polynomials. To further increase the computational speed, an interval
shrinking strategy is adopted via investigating the geometric relationship
between the ground viewing cone and the orbit trajectory. Simulation results
show a 98% decrease in computation time over the brute force method. The method
is suitable for all orbital types and analytical orbit propagators.
