Efficient Coverage Methods for Earth Observing Tradespace Analysis

Distributed Spacecraft Mission simulations are long-running simulations for mission tradespace exploration. The simulation running time increases as the number of satellites, simulation duration, and target points increases. Future Earth Observing DSM simulations utilize GEOS-5 Nature Run data. The GEOS-5 database provides weather simulation data for two years with a 30-minute timestep and storms are represented as target points. Simulating DSMs with the GEOS-5 database leads to the need for an efficient coverage method that reduces simulation run time because the GEOS-5 database provides thousands of target points to observe by a mission. We develop a new and efficient coverage methodology that performs faster than the current minimum elevation angle coverage method. The new approach uses two projection methods to create a coverage area on a 2D map. The two projections methods (circular and line) rely on collecting ground track position over a time interval and projecting sensor swath over each ground track position. The results show that the methodology provides a configuration with a speedup factor of approximately 950 and relatively high accuracy for a one-hour simulation with about 1700 target points distributed globally. This study presents a trade-off analysis for these two coverage methods to minimize simulation run time while maximizing accuracy.