Lunar Orbit Design of a Satellite Swarm for Radio Astronomy

Abstract

Employing a satellite swarm for radio astronomy has been continuously addressed in the Orbiting Low Frequency ARray (OLFAR) project. A 100 km diameter of aperture array constructed by distributed satellites will be able to provide sky maps of better than 1 arc-minute spatial resolution at 10 MHz. However, an orbit design strategy for the swarm satellites that ensures safe intersatellite distances and relative orbit stability has not yet been developed. In this paper, a new method for OLFAR orbit design is proposed. A deterministic solution is presented based on three algebraic constraints derived here, which represent three orbit design requirements: collision avoidance, maximum baseline rate, and uvw-space coverage. In addition, an idea for observation planning over the mission lifetime is presented.