Study to compare the cost and the risk implications of implementing the Aerosol-Cloud-Ecosystem (ACE) mission using a traditional architecture approach versus a small satellite based architecture
- Paper number
IAC-10.B4.4.11
- Author
Dr. Armin Ellis, Jet Propulsion Laboratory - California Institute of Technology, United States
- Coauthor
Leigh Rosenberg, United States
- Coauthor
Ms. Deborah Vane, United States
- Year
2010
- Abstract
The Aerosol-Cloud-Ecosystem (ACE) mission is described in the National Academy of Sciences’ decadal survey for Earth sciences and it is intended to be used primarily for the study of aerosol-cloud interactions. There are four primary instruments on ACE and the science objective requires collecting a five year minimum data set, using all four instruments concurrently. In this paper we present two architecture concepts for ACE, and we compare the risk and cost implications of these approaches. The first architecture concept is considered to be a more traditional approach, housing all four instruments on a single satellite bus platform. The second architecture uses one small satellite bus dedicated to each of the primary instruments. Additionally to ensure that the field-of-views of the instruments overlap, the small satellite buses have been designed to have orbit maintenance capability. The discussed study results include the total launch cost, reliability considerations, programmatic considerations, and operational issues concerning these two approaches.
- Abstract document
- Manuscript document
(absent)