Satellites Orbit Design and Determination for the Australian Garada Project

Li Qiao, Chris Rizos, Andrew Dempster

Abstract:	Australia is presently investigating the design of an earth observation Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) satellite mission, known as “Garada”, optimised to collect SAR images over Australia’s huge land mass for a variety of applications using several small satellites flying in formation. The Australian Centre for Space Engineering Research (ACSER) is funded by a grant from the Australian Space Research Program to conduct and coordinate project research activities across several academic and industry partners. The applications of interest for this proposed mission are flood and disaster monitoring, and early warning deforestation detection for tropical forests. This paper describes some aspects of the mission design, including the mission objectives and the brief satellite design. It presents the requirements and considerations regarding the choice of satellite orbits. The orbit design is mainly driven by the SAR imaging performance, the lifetime of the satellites, and coverage requirements such as revisit time. The area of interest is the Australian continent. In order to achieve a rapid revisit time a satellite constellation is proposed.
Published in:	Proceedings of the 24th International Technical Meeting of the Satellite Division of The Institute of Navigation (ION GNSS 2011) September 20 - 23, 2011 Oregon Convention Center, Portland, Oregon Portland, OR
Pages:	1075 - 1081
Cite this article:	Qiao, Li, Rizos, Chris, Dempster, Andrew, "Satellites Orbit Design and Determination for the Australian Garada Project," Proceedings of the 24th International Technical Meeting of the Satellite Division of The Institute of Navigation (ION GNSS 2011), Portland, OR, September 2011, pp. 1075-1081.
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