Satellite swarm survey and new conceptual design for Earth observation applications

Abstract

The new trend in Earth observation applications is to use a set of low-cost, simple and short development time satellites. A Swarm mission of twelve CubeSats as imaging nodes, besides, hub Microsatellite was already proposed to fulfill the earth observation mission called Fractionated Imaging Satellite Cluster (FIC). The weakest point in that proposal was the using of an optical communication link between the imaging node satellites and one hub satellite to transfer a huge amount of imaging data. As optical communication needs a highly accurate attitude control system that exceeds the capability of CubeSats, and it is not commercially available yet. This paper gives a survey of the previously published swarm mission and it gives a proposed configuration of satellite swarm that allows using commercially available radio-frequency communication subsystems between the swarm members to fulfill the required mission.

Keywords

• Swarm satellites design
• Spacecraft mission analysis
• Formation flying
• Distributed space systems
• Fractionated imaging
• CubeSat