Orbital anomalies of CubeSats in solar synchronous orbit during initial orbit determination
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Abstract
The SNAPPY Mission is a NASA-Funded project at the Wichita State University aiming to send a neutrino particle detector into a low earth orbit to collect high amounts of scientific data. The satellite will enter solar synchronous orbit, meaning that it will have an altitude of approximately 500-700 kilometers at an angle about 97 degrees from the equator. Due to the nature of this orbit, it will experience perturbations from solar radiation pressure, atmospheric drag, and gravitational perturbations. The aim of this study is to characterize these changes and note any anomalies in the trends of their Keplerian orbital elements (elements that define the orbit numerically) to support the operational procedures of launching the neutrino-detector-CubeSat. A large dataset of nano-satellite information was procured utilizing an API scrapping python algorithm that fetched data through queries to Space-Track.org. A separate python algorithm was developed to organize the data, which was then analyzed to determine dependencies of elements. The satellites of most interest were those launched from the Transporter-13 Falcon 9 ride share program. These satellites were also compared with a variety of satellites from launches dating as far back as 2013. It was determined that the majority of elements were time-dependent and followed trends with insignificant variations (R2 values were near or above .99 for all time dependent elements) in their orbit one month after launch. Furthermore, a high correlation was observed between B-Star (drag term) and solar radiation flux.
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Research project completed at the Department of Aerospace Engineering.