Design and optimization of a polar satellite mission to complement the Copernicus System

© 2018 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes,creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works. IEEE Access Best Multimedia Award 2018, pel video de 4'50'' que acompanya l'article: sobre el sistema ONION (a Distributed Satellite Systems (DSS) concept formed by a Walker-Delta constellation formed by 8 heavy nodes including a SAR-X and an optical imager, and 8 small nodes including a GNSS-R payload. ONION provides innovative solutions to complement the current and planned Copernicus offer, targeting relevant and large user communities) The space industry is currently witnessing two concurrent trends: the increased modularity and miniaturization of technologies and the deployment of constellations of distributed satellite systems. As a consequence of the first trend, the relevance of small satellites in line with the “cheaper and faster” philosophy is increasing. The second one opens up completely new horizons by enabling the design of architectures aimed at improving the performance, reliability, and efficiency of current and future space missions. The EU H2020 ONION project (“Operational Network of Individual Observation Nodes”) has leveraged on the concept of Fractionated and Federated Satellite Systems (FFSS) to develop and design innovative mission architectures resulting in a competitive advantage for European Earth Observation (EO) systems. Starting from the analysis of emerging needs in the European EO market, the solutions to meet these needs are identified and characterized by exploring FFSS. In analogy with terrestrial networks, these systems envision the distribution of satellite functionalities amongst multiple cooperating spacecrafts (nodes of a network), possibly independent, and flying on different orbits. FFSS are considered by many as the future of spacebased infrastructures, as they offer a pragmatic, progressive, and scalable approach to improve existing and future space missions. This work summarizes the main results of the ONION project and the high-level design of the Marine Weather Forecast mission for polar regions. Peer Reviewed Award-winning