2008 Volume 56 Issue 658 Pages 510-515
This paper has studied the optimal formations for the Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR) missions with multiple satellites. InSAR is one of the most attracting technologies currently in space observation field. It utilizes two or more images of the same target, enabling the construction of the 3D images of the globe. InSAR can be performed in real time with multiple satellites flying nearby. Such missions have been already proposed in some previous studies. These studies, however, have just proposed apparently balanced designs of formation, such as N-regular polygon formation with N satellites, without giving the details on optimal formation strategies. In order to give simple formation designing strategies for multiple-satellite InSAR missions, this paper discusses the optimization of a satellite formation, based on mathematics and numerical simulation. This report, or the first report, shows the simplified evaluation function for formations of InSAR missions first. Using this function, this study conducted formation optimization without taking into account satellites' relative motion, such as the rotation in a centrifugal stabilized formation. The optimal formation designing strategies with such relative motions have been described in the second report following this report.
