Nanosatellites

15 I-3dFormations of Small Satellites

Klaus Schilling

¹Chair for Informatics VII, University of Würzburg, Germany

²Zentrum für Telematik, Würzburg, Germany

15.1 Introduction

Compared to traditional satellites, miniaturized satellites exhibit limited capabilities of each satellite, but enable multisatellite systems at the same costs. Realized as a distributed self-organizing formation of picosatellites or nanosatellites, they result in significant perspectives for innovative scientific approaches and functionalities [1–9]. There is significant application potential in the field of telecommunication in the context of Internet of Things [10], as well as in Earth observation for sensor networks with higher temporal and spatial resolutions [4, 11, 12]. Today, multisatellite systems are mainly organized as constellations (such as GPS, Iridium, OneWeb, A-train), where each satellite is individually controlled from ground stations. Further, improved performance is expected from formations, where the satellites self-organize on basis of direct information exchange and distributed control approaches (such as the two-satellite missions of GRACE (http://grace.jpl.nasa.gov), TanDEM-X [13], PRISMA [14], CanX-4/CanX-5 [15]). On the hardware side, miniaturized attitude and orbit control systems as well as on-board data-handling capacities support realization of formations even at picosatellite level [6, 16–18], [8]. The goal of this chapter is to elaborate the theoretical and technology background ...