Session
Poster Session 1
Location
Salt Palace Convention Center, Salt Lake City, UT
Abstract
Very-low Earth orbit (≲ 300 km) enables high-resolution imaging with smaller optics. A leader/follower pair can halve the revisit gap by maintaining precise along-track phasing.
At 250 km, even a small ballistic-coefficient mismatch amplified by geomagnetic storms drives a phasing error that grows quadratically in time and closes the imaging window within days.
- Conventional methods focus on formation keeping and react to density after the fact.
- We act before the drift grows: a density forecast is used to choose both the handover phase and the optimal time to reverse the drift.
Document Type
Event
Included in
Forecast-Aware Formation Initialization for High-Revisit VLEO Imaging
Salt Palace Convention Center, Salt Lake City, UT
Very-low Earth orbit (≲ 300 km) enables high-resolution imaging with smaller optics. A leader/follower pair can halve the revisit gap by maintaining precise along-track phasing.
At 250 km, even a small ballistic-coefficient mismatch amplified by geomagnetic storms drives a phasing error that grows quadratically in time and closes the imaging window within days.
- Conventional methods focus on formation keeping and react to density after the fact.
- We act before the drift grows: a density forecast is used to choose both the handover phase and the optimal time to reverse the drift.
