Mission and System Architecture for an Operational Network of Earth Observation Satellite Nodes

Paper number

IAC-19,D1,2,5,x52778

Author

Dr. Stefania Tonetti, Spain, Deimos Space SLU

Coauthor

Ms. Stefania Cornara, Spain, Deimos Space S.L.

Coauthor

Mr. Gonzalo Vicario de Miguel, Spain, Deimos Space S.L.

Coauthor

Mr. Stephane Pierotti, France, Thales Alenia Space France

Coauthor

Mrs. Judith Cote, France, Thales Alenia Space France

Coauthor

Mr. Carles Araguz, Spain, Technical University of Catalonia (UPC)

Coauthor

Dr. Eduard Alarcón, Spain, Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya (UPC)

Coauthor

Mr. Adriano Camps, Spain, Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya (UPC)

Coauthor

Mr. David Llaveria, Spain, Technical University of Catalonia (UPC)

Coauthor

Ms. Estefany Lancheros, Spain, Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya-BarcelonaTech

Coauthor

Mr. Joan Adrià Ruiz de Azúa Ortega, Spain, Technical University of Catalonia (UPC)

Coauthor

Ms. Elisenda Bou-Balust, Spain, Technical University of Catalonia (UPC)

Coauthor

Mr. Pedro Rodríguez, Spain, Thales Alenia Space Espana

Coauthor

Mr. Mateusz Sochacki, Poland, Warsaw University of Technology (WUT)

Coauthor

Prof. Janusz Narkiewicz, Poland, Warsaw University of Technology (WUT)

Year

2019

Abstract

Over the next few years, Europe will take important steps towards implementing the architecture of the Copernicus Space Component for Earth Observation (EO), fulfilling the needs of stakeholders concerned with land monitoring, marine monitoring, atmosphere monitoring, emergency management, security, and climate change.
Nowadays, constellations and distributed networks of satellites are emerging as clear development trends in the space system market to enable augmentation, enhancement, and possibilities of new applications for future EO Missions. It is of paramount importance for Europe to properly analyse these trends and assess whether or not they could provide a competitive advantage for EO systems.
The paper presents the mission and system architecture design of the H2020 ONION project, a European Union research activity that proposes a system concept to supplement in a progressive way the current European EO infrastructures and to serve emerging needs in an optimal fashion. 
Among several use cases considered, the ONION project focussed on proposing system architectures to provide competitive revisit time, data latency and image resolution for two demanding application scenarios of interest: marine weather forecast (MWF) and agricultural hydric stress.
A set of promising system architectures has been subject of a comprehensive assessment, based on mission analysis expertise and detailed simulation for evaluating several key parameters such as revisit time and data latency of each measurement of interest, on-board memory evolution and power budget of each satellite of the constellation, ground station contacts and inter-satellite links. The architectures are built with several heterogeneous satellite nodes distributed in different orbital planes. Each platform can embark different instrument sets, which provide the required measurements for each use case.
A detailed mission analysis has then been applied to the selected architecture for the MWF use case, including refined data flow analysis to optimize system resources; refined power budget analysis; delta-V and fuel budget analysis considering all the possible phases of the mission, encompassing correction of launcher injection errors and acquisition of nominal satellite position inside the constellation, orbit maintenance to control altitude, collision avoidance to avoid collision with space debris objects and end-of-life disposal to comply with EOL guidelines.
The relevance of the system architecture selected for the MWF has been evaluated for 3 use cases of interest (Arctic sea-ice monitoring, maritime fishery pressure and aquaculture, agricultural hydric stress) to show the versatility and the feasibility of the chosen architecture to be adapted for other EO applications.

Abstract document

IAC-19,D1,2,5,x52778.brief.pdf

Manuscript document

IAC-19,D1,2,5,x52778.pdf (🔒 authorized access only).

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