Designing a GRACE-type satellite constellation for hydrologic science
Abstract
After the successful Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) mission, which ended in 2017, GRACE-FO was launched in May of this year to continue providing information on Earth's time-varying gravity field. Due to their mission architecture both GRACE and GRACE-FO are limited in their spatio-temporal resolution. By using a single pair, their resolution is limited temporally to a monthly scale and spatially to a few hundred kilometers. In an effort to design future mission architectures for after GRACE-FO, we focus on improving the global spatio-temporal coverage. In order to increase the temporal resolution of global coverage and therefore allow for the determination of sub-monthly time-varying gravity field events, a constellation of GRACE-type pairs is necessary. Small satellite systems are increasingly being used in scientific missions, due to their increase in affordability and improvement in performance over the past years. This will soon allow for the deployment of a constellation of GRACE-type satellites. In this work, we study the design of a constellation of multiple satellites in order to determine sub-monthly time-varying gravity field events. Analyzing the performance of different orbital configurations, numbers of satellites and their relative spatio-temporal resolution helps us comprehend the relative advantages of each constellation design.
- Publication:
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AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2018
- Bibcode:
- 2018AGUFM.G13C0557D
- Keywords:
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- 1217 Time variable gravity;
- GEODESY AND GRAVITYDE: 1218 Mass balance;
- GEODESY AND GRAVITYDE: 1223 Ocean/Earth/atmosphere/hydrosphere/cryosphere interactions;
- GEODESY AND GRAVITYDE: 1240 Satellite geodesy: results;
- GEODESY AND GRAVITY