A Constraint Based Approach for Building Operationally Responsive Space Satellites

The Operationally Responsive Space program requires flexible and responsive satellites to meet their user's needs. Traditional satellite design methods are typically iterative processes that optimize individual components, subsystems, and ultimately the entire satellite. This study focuses on developing a new approach for creating Responsive Satellites from Plug-and-Play components. The aim is to create an approach that quickly evaluates a wide variety of possible satellite configurations and identifies the best configurations that meet the user's needs and constraints. Satellite configurations are created by matching locations on the satellite structure with Plug-and-Play components. Various constraints are derived from the user's inputs at different levels of the configuration process. As the user provides more information related to Plug-and-Play satellite, additional constraints can be applied to reduce the number of Plug-and-Play satellite configurations resulting in manageable numbers of configurations from which the user can ultimately select the final configuration.