THE DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION OF DRAPER'S EARTH PHENOMENA OBSERVING SYSTEM (EPOS)

Current Earth observation systems trade coverage and revisit times against the number and measurement sensitivity of satellites and on-board sensors. The coverage and utility of observations these large satellites provide are restricted by their selected orbit, launch time, and bus reliability. To lower development and operations costs, a recently proposed alternative is to develop and launch a large suite of smaller size satellites that perform single-purpose measurements. We present initial results from algorithms developed for autonomous reconfiguration of large numbers of Earth observation satellites made possible in a future world wherein refueling of satellites and/or launching of new satellites is cost effective. The algorithms will reduce requirements on the human operators of such a system of satellites, improve system resource utilization, and provide the capability to dynamically respond to temporal terrestrial phenomena. Our initial system model consists of small numbers of satellites, a single point of interest on Earth (e.g., hurricane) with the objective to maximize the total coverage of the target during a number of orbits. An integrated approach using integer programming, network optimization and astrodynamics was used to calculate integrated observation and maneuver plans that maximize the total coverage of the target while adhering to fuel constraints.