Mission Performance Measures for Spacecraft Formation Flying

Clusters of low-performance spacecraft flying in formation may provide enhanced performance over single high-performance spacecraft. This is especially true for remote sensing missions where interferometry or stereographic imaging may provide higher resolution data. The configuration of such formations vary during an orbit due to orbital dynamics, and over larger time scales due to perturbations. Selection of a configuration should be based on overall performance of the formation. In this paper, performance measures are developed and evaluated based on integration over one orbit. The measures involve angular separation of spacecraft, instantaneous overlap access area, and an area-based measure of the separation of the spacecraft. An optimization scheme is used to determine the best configuration for a four-spacecraft formation.