A SmallSat constellation mission architecture for a GRACE-type mission design
Abstract
The Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) launched in 2002 and has been providing invaluable information of Earth's time-varying gravity field and GRACE-FO will continue this time series. For this work, we focus on architectures of future post-GRACE-FO like missions. Single pairs of satellites like GRACE and GRACE-FO are inherently limited in their spatio-temporal coverage. Full global coverage for a single pair can take up to 30 days for spatial resolutions of a few hundred kilometers, thus a single satellite pair is unable to observe sub-monthly signals in the Earth's time varying gravity field (e.g. hydrologic signals, etc.). Small satellite systems are becoming increasingly affordable and will soon allow a constellation of GRACE-type satellites to be deployed, with the capability to range between multiple satellites. Here, using simulation studies, we investigate the performance of such a constellation for different numbers of satellites (N) and different orbital configurations, in order to understand the improved performance that might be gained from such future mission architectures.
- Publication:
-
AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2017
- Bibcode:
- 2017AGUFM.G31B0918D
- Keywords:
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- 1214 Geopotential theory and determination;
- GEODESY AND GRAVITY;
- 1217 Time variable gravity;
- GEODESY AND GRAVITY;
- 1225 Global change from geodesy;
- GEODESY AND GRAVITY;
- 1241 Satellite geodesy: technical issues;
- GEODESY AND GRAVITY