Geometric Approach to Orbital Formation Mission Design

For distributed remote sensing architectures to be useful for collecting data, it is essential to have a methodology for relating orbital formation parameters to remote sensing requirements. Utilizing the characteristics of formation parameters, an orbital design approach is developed that establishes a satellite formation from a desired instantaneous spatial distribution as viewed from a target ground site. To maintain a conceptually basic representation, a geometric approach is used to develop the correlating algorithm. This tool will enable mission planning for orbital formations as well as future concept exploration.