Exploring the Trade-offs of Aggregated versus Disaggregated Architectures for Environmental Monitoring in Low-Earth Orbit
Name
Crawley_Exploring the.pdf
Size
1.42 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
491289ad1f23c3d8ab35492bf3178cb0
Author(s)
Dwyer, Morgan
Selva, Daniel
Szajnfarber, Zoe
Del Portillo Barrios, Inigo
Sanchez Net, Marc
Cameron, Bruce Gregory
Crawley, Edward F.
Date Issued
August 2014
Journal
Proceedings of the AIAA SPACE 2014 Conference and Exposition
Publisher
American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics
Citation
Dwyer, Morgan, Daniel Selva, Inigo del Portillo, Marc Sanchez-Net, Bruce Cameron, Zoe Szajnfarber, and Edward Crawley. “Exploring the Trade-Offs of Aggregated Versus Disaggregated Architectures for Environmental Monitoring in Low-Earth Orbit.” AIAA SPACE 2014 Conference and Exposition (August 2014).
Version
Author's final manuscript
Abstract
Traditionally, government space agencies have developed aggregated systems that co-host multiple capabilities on shared spacecraft buses. However, in response to cost growth and schedule delays on past programs, leaders in the government space community have expressed an interest in disaggregation, or distributing their capabilities across multiple spacecraft. Since their aggregated National Polar-orbiting Operational Satellite System (NPOESS) program was cancelled in 2010, both the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the Department of Defense (DoD) have investigated opportunities to reduce program costs through disaggregation. This paper expands their initial investigation and explores the cost impacts of aggregation and disaggregation across a large trade space of candidate architectures for environmental monitoring in low-Earth orbit. We find that on average, aggregated architectures are less costly than fully disaggregated ones but also find opportunities for cost savings by developing semi-aggregated systems, or systems with one or two satellites per orbital plane. Finally, we investigate several trades that are currently under consideration by NOAA and the DoD and make recommendations for future environmental monitoring systems in low-Earth orbit.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Engineering Systems Division
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.2514/6.2014-4416
