Economical remote sensing from a low altitude with continuous drag compensation

Fearn, D. G.

doi:10.1016/j.actaastro.2004.09.052

Cited by 14 publications

(13 citation statements)

References 11 publications

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“…Sun synchronous or low inclination angle orbits depend on the remote sensing mission requirements, revisit time and location of target. Micro satellite categorization is based on low mass, low power consumption, and low cost architecture requirements [21][22]. Generally, satellite consists of platform and payload; payload may be active or passive imaging system.…”

Section: Satellite Platform Descriptionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Reliability Improvement of Low Earth Orbit Micro Satellite

Badway

Elhady

El-Badawy

2018

The International Conference on Applied Mechanics and Mechanica

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Satellite mass and reliability are two contradicting parameters affecting the satellite cost. To get a cost effective satellite, it would be necessary to compromise between low mass and high reliability. This challenge attracts the interest of many space institutions. This study presents an iterative simple technique to calculate and improve satellite reliability with low redundancy for the benefits of low mass. The failure contribution factor plays a strong role in the identification of the weak path which leads to system failure and propose the candidate component(s) to be duplicated. The present technique presents the failure contribution percentage of each component to satellite system failure and order them based on severity. Depending on the results the designer has to decide continue redundant or stop the process of improvement. The proposed technique had applied to a case study as a proof of concept. The work result shows how the proposed technique is simple and highly effective. More investigation will be applied to a real satellite project in the nearest future.

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Section: Satellite Platform Descriptionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Reliability Improvement of Low Earth Orbit Micro Satellite

Badway

Elhady

El-Badawy

2018

The International Conference on Applied Mechanics and Mechanica

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“…There is increasing interest in improving the capabilities and reducing the cost of Earth observation platforms by operating in orbits with much lower altitudes in a region commonly referred to as Very Low Earth Orbit (VLEO) [1]. VLEO provides a number of advantages over higher altitude orbits, such as reduced payload size and mass [1,2] as well as reduction in the payload power requirements, and improvements in the data rate [3,4]. It therefore provides the opportunity to reduce the overall cost of a platform for a given mission as compared to similar platforms at more common higher altitudes.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…However, they still require fuel which becomes the limiting factor on the operational life of the platform [12] as was the case of with both GOCE and SLATS. The fuel required is proportional to the thrust and by extension the drag that the satellite experiences [2], therefore it is desirable to minimise the drag as much as practicable in order to reduce the fuel mass fraction or to extend the life of the platform. Since the drag a satellite experiences is linked to its geometry [13], it is necessary to identify configurations that may prove beneficial within the rarefied gas of the thermosphere of VLEO.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Drag reduction through shape optimisation for satellites in Very Low Earth Orbit

2021

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Operating satellites at altitudes in Very Low Earth Orbit (VLEO) has many advantages. However, due to the higher atmospheric density of this region, satellites encounter significantly higher atmospheric drag.Depending on the mission, this may require a propulsive system to maintain the orbit which costs both fuel mass and volume. It is therefore desirable to reduce the drag in order to either reduce these costs or to extend the operational life. In this paper a series of viable aeroshell profiles are identified for satellites operating in VLEO using a Radial Basis Function-based surrogate model with data generated using both Panel Methods and Discrete Simulation Monte Carlo simulations. It was demonstrated that a maximum drag reduction of between 21% and 35% was achievable for the profiles when optimizing a bi-conic profile for minimum drag based on Discreet Simulation Monte Carlo simulations with an energy accommodation coefficient of 0.95. Accounting for the loss of internal volume and assuming the reduction in fuel mass results in an equally proportioned reduction in fuel system volume it was observed that only a 13% to 27% reduction was achieved.

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“…For very low altitude orbits, drag compensation can be the dominant factor in the mission delta-v budget, while the contribution due to de-orbiting becomes more pronounced at higher altitudes. In any case, the total delta-v may grow to a level justifying the adoption of a high specific impulse, low-thrust technology such as Electric Propulsion (EP) [11,12,13,14]. Indeed, a number of EP-based LEO missions have been recently launched [15].…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

An adaptive groundtrack maintenance scheme for spacecraft with electric propulsion

et al. 2020

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In this paper, the repeat-groundtrack orbit maintenance problem is addressed for spacecraft driven by electric propulsion. An adaptive solution is proposed, which combines an hysteresis controller and a recursive least squares filter. The controller provides a pulse-width modulated command to the thruster, in compliance with the peculiarities of the electric propulsion technology. The filter takes care of estimating a set of environmental disturbance parameters, from inertial position and velocity measurements. The resulting control scheme is able to compensate for the groundtrack drift due to atmospheric drag, in a fully autonomous manner. A numerical study of a low Earth orbit mission confirms the effectiveness of the proposed method.

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Economical remote sensing from a low altitude with continuous drag compensation

Cited by 14 publications

References 11 publications

Reliability Improvement of Low Earth Orbit Micro Satellite

Reliability Improvement of Low Earth Orbit Micro Satellite

Drag reduction through shape optimisation for satellites in Very Low Earth Orbit

An adaptive groundtrack maintenance scheme for spacecraft with electric propulsion

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