Thesis
Target area based methods for analytical satellite orbit design and tasking
- Creator
- Rights statement
- Awarding institution
- University of Strathclyde
- Date of award
- 2025
- Thesis identifier
- T17394
- Person Identifier (Local)
- 201989678
- Qualification Level
- Qualification Name
- Department, School or Faculty
- Abstract
- Space has become increasingly congested, commercialised, and inter-connected over the past few decades. The “New Space” era and the use of federated space systems are intended to make space more affordable and accessible to more users. The use of agile space has also increased in the past few decades. To sustain this increase, new, fast, efficient, and robust methodologies are required for satellite orbit designs, constellation determination and satellite tasking paradigms. Additionally, methods aiding the increase in the value of assets already in space are also a valuable contribution to the space industry especially in reducing the rising space congestion and “space pollution”. The asset value increase may be found in filling coverage gaps or supplementing the functionality of existing space population for diversified service providers. A rapid, robust, and efficient approach for orbit design/determination based on desired target coverage is herein proposed. The proposed method is fully analytical and of the so-called embarrassingly parallel nature. The fully analytical property eliminates the necessity for iterative computations resulting in increased efficiency. The embarrassingly parallel nature makes the method analyse each orbital element and time combination within a given search space independently allowing for efficient parallel execution. This provides a basis for robust multi-objective optimisation of the determined orbits. The development of the method and some application scenarios while considering both single and multi-objective missions are presented. The research presented also develops a novel graph-theory based method for multi-satellite tasking which is aimed at value addition to satellites already in space. The interaction between satellites in different orbits and ground targets is modelled using bipartite networks. Determination of the satellite(s) to be tasked is based on the optimisation of different requirements and this can be modelled as a combinatorial network problem. The developed method uses an analysis of static bipartite graphs to determine the optimum satellite and ground target interactions based on the mission objectives, referred to as tasks. Optimum satellites for various tasks are determined using a combination edge weight and graph structure analysis. The network developed give insights for scalable analysis of options involving multiple ground targets and satellite options. To illustrate the application of the method, different networks are studied; simple networks and complex networks considering complexity both in terms of number of satellites and ground targets. This method proves to be fast, simple, efficient, and robust in determining optimal satellites for multiple objective function tasking.
- Advisor / supervisor
- Macdonald, Malcolm (Aerospace engineer)
- Resource Type
- DOI
- Funder
Relations
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PDF of thesis T17394 | 2025-06-13 | Public | Download |