Flower Constellations for Telemedicine Services

Flower constellations are a particular set of satellite constellations where every satellite covers the same repeating space track. When the flower constellations are visualized on an Earth centred earth fixed reference frame, the relative orbits shows flower-shaped figures centered on the Earth. In this paper the shape and the position of a particular flower constellations has been designed for the provision of telemedicine services. Once that performance metrics of the constellation have been defined and the service targets have been identified, the performance of the flower constellation have been compared with the well known polar and Walker constellations. The particular properties of the flower constellations allow an optimized coverage of a list of targets. It was found that the flower constellations provide better performance in terms access availability and mean access time.