Coverage characteristics of hurricane monitoring CubeSat constellations under orbital perturbations

Abstract

Miniaturized precipitation radars deployed on CubeSats have the potential to significantly improve hurricane forecasting by collecting measurements over data-starved regions and by complementing the existing sensor infrastructure in other places. The use of narrow-swath sensors typically lead to the deployment of hundreds of CubeSats in a constellation to meet the spatial and temporal needs needs of state-of-the-art weather forecasting systems. To this end, this paper investigates the effect of orbital perturbations on the performance of such a constellation measured by the coverage it provides over a designated geographical area. In addition, we determine the station-keeping requirements of constituent CubeSats in order to counteract the effect of fourth-order geopotential perturbations and atmospheric drag. Using numerical simulations, we have quantified the effects for a 240 satellite constellation observing the mainland United States and the Atlantic basin.