The satellite scheduling community has provided several algorithms for allocating interaction windows between ground stations and satellites, from simple greedy approaches to more complex hybrid-genetic or Lagrangian-relaxation techniques. Single-location ground station problems, where requests have fixed time intervals and no priorities, are known to be solvable in polynomial time. To the best...

Microsatellites in Low Earth Orbits (LEO) have been in use for the past two decades. Low Earth Orbit satellites are used for public communication and also for scientific purposes. Thus, it may be expected that such missions will be further developed in the near future especially in fields where similar experiments by purely Earth-based means are impracticable. Ground stations have to be establi...

Air Force Research Laboratory's Distributed Architecture and Simulation Laboratory (DASL) is designed to support the development of new concepts in space systems. One new concept is AFRL’s TechSat 21 program. TechSat 21 is a cluster of formation-flying and cooperating satellites. TechSat 21 poses significant challenges to satellite operations. The ground control station must be capable of monit...

The ground-based ozone observation instrument, Brewer spectrophotometer (Brewer), was used to evaluate the quality of total column (TOC) produced by multiple polar-orbit satellite measurements at three stations in Antarctica (King Sejong, Jang Bogo, and Zhongshan stations). While all TOCs showed high correlations with (R = ~0.8 0.9), there are some TOC differences among data austral spring, whi...

An orbiting 'photon clock' is proposed to test directly the relativity of simultane-ity of special relativity. This is done by comparison of the arrival times at a ground station of three microwave signals transmitted by two satellites following the same low Earth orbit. A similar experiment, that may be performed using synchronised signals from two GPS satellites with the receiver on a single ...

Satellite formation flying is an essential capability for many space missions that allow several closely spaced smaller satellites to be deployed. Depending on mission requirements, the ground receive station may carry several antennas and receive signal from each of the satellites in order to increase spectral efficiency and Quality of Service (QoS). In this paper, we propose an improved clust...

We present a new database of solar radiation at ground level for Eastern Europe and Africa, the Middle East and Asia, estimated using satellite images from the Meteosat East geostationary satellites. The method presented calculates global horizontal (G) and direct normal irradiance (DNI) at hourly intervals, using the full Meteosat archive from 1998 to present. Validation of the estimated globa...