Engineering Commons^™

Satellite Formation Flight Navigation Using The Clohessy-Wiltshire Equations, Anna Kimmich

Aerospace Engineering

This report presents the design and simulation of a satellite navigation program using Matlab. The program allows any number of independent satellites to navigate in a co-planar cluster formation in a circular orbit with no input besides its location coordinates from a simulated GPS unit and the relative location of other satellites from a simulated on-board sensor. This navigation program uses a potential field-like function to calculate the desired satellite position within the formation. It uses the Clohessy-Wiltshire equations to calculate the impulsive maneuvers needed to achieve and maintain the formation.

Store And Forward Routing For Sparse Pico-Satellite Sensor Networks With Data-Mules, Trevor Joseph Koritza

Master's Theses

Satellites are playing an increasingly important role in collecting scientific information, providing communication services, and revolutionizing navigation. Until recently satellites were large and very expensive, creating a high barrier to entry that only large corporations and government agencies could overcome. In the past few years the CubeSat project at California Polytechnic University in San Luis Obispo (Cal Poly) has worked to refine the design and launching of small, lightweight, and less expensive satellites called pico-satellites, opening space up to a wider audience. Now that Cal Poly has the launch logistics and hardware under control, a new problem has arisen. These …

Development Of An Imager System Optimized For Low-Power, Limited-Bandwidth Space Applications, Kalia R. Glassey

Master's Theses

A relatively new picosatellite standard, CubeSats have traditionally been used for simple educational missions. As CubeSats become more complex and utilize more complex sensors such as imagers, they gain enhanced credibility as satellite platforms.

Imaging systems on CubeSats have the potential to be used for a variety of uses, such as earth and weather monitoring, attitude determination, and remote sensing. However the size and power limitations of CubeSats pose an interesting challenge to the design of a capable, robust imaging system.

This thesis outlines the objectives and requirements of CP-3’s imaging system, and describes the development process and methods. Test …

Generating Multi-Sensor Precipitation Estimates Over Radar Gap Areas, Shayesteh E. Mahani, Reza Khanbilvardi

Publications and Research

Generating a multi-sensor precipitation product over radar gap area is the objective of the present study. A merging approach is developed to improve Satellite-based Precipitation Estimates (SPE) by merging with ground-based Radar Rainfall (RR) estimates because remote satellites are the only source that can collect information from areas where are inaccessible by ground-based radar and/or rain gauge networks. The merging algorithm is capable of extending radar information from pixels with available RR to their neighboring pixels with no radar information by merging RR with SPE, which is, usually, available for all pixels. SPE is combined with RR using the weighting-based …