Eventos Anais de eventos
COBEM 2023
27th International Congress of Mechanical Engineering
Optimizing Communication for Catarina Constellation’s Nanossatelites
Submission Author:
Guilherme Gomes , SC
Co-Authors:
Guilherme Gomes, Rafael Cuenca, Damylle Donati, Talita Possamai, Rodrigo Cardozo
Presenter: Guilherme Gomes
doi://10.26678/ABCM.COBEM2023.COB2023-0317
Abstract
The Brazilian Data Collection System (SBCD) comprises geostationary satellites and a series of devices and ground stations available to operate with such space systems in order to acquire data, mostly environmental, and feed climate and defense analysis in the Brazilian territory. However, the high cost of large satellite projects prevents the large-scale production of these systems, which, together with the restrictions on the availability of mostly national communication protocols, shows the tendency of the SBCD to become obsolete in the coming decades. Under this scenario, the Catarina Constellation project was created, with the aim of developing a constellation of nanosatellites that could be added to the SBCD, in order to lower the cost of replacing space systems, foster the Santa Catarina space industry and strengthen the relationship of the so-called triple helix, formed by industry, government and universities. However, for such a constellation to be able to efficiently replace possible geostationary satellites, mission requirements must be fulfilled taking into account crucial design and operation variables for the constellation's operation, such as number of satellites, chosen orbit parameters and launch’s time windows. In order to optimize communication between the satellites of Catarina Constellation’s Fleet A and its designated earth stations, initially the ground station of Natal - RN and the Data Collection Platform based on Florianópolis - SC. A genetic algorithm orbit optimization was conducted for 2, 3 and 5 CubeSats. The inclinations of 30, 50 and 98 degrees were considered as cases of study and the optimization was performed using RAAN and Satellite altitude as design variables. The genetic algorithm uses the roulette selection algorithm with single point crossover and mutation to define the offspring and elitism to ensure that the best solution was kept during the generations, in order to decrease the computational cost, the evolutionary differentiation strategy was used . Preliminary results show that the optimized orbit was improved when compared with previous results.
Keywords
Catarina Constellation, cubesat, Orbital mechanics, Genetic Algorithms, Communication optimization
