Freely drifting cubesat constellations for improving coverage for Arctic sensor networks

In recent years, the interest for the Arctic area has been increasing. Harvesting of scientific data and environmental monitoring are key activities. The Arctic has poor communication infrastructure, both by terrestrial and satellite systems. Launching a free-flying constellation of small is one proposal to help mitigate this service gap. CubeSats are traditionally built with industrial-grade components, which reduces the development time and hardware cost. Since the cost of one satellite is low, it is possible to launch several together. The CubeSats are generally launched without any station keeping capabilities, as this increases cost and complexity in both the production and operational phase. Without station keeping, the swarm satellites will drift relatively to each other. The governing parameter of the drift is the velocity difference of the satellites at the time of deployment. This paper shows how a freely drifting swarm can improve the coverage for sensor networks in the Arctic, when an effort is made to optimize this velocity difference at deployment. E.g., a free-flying constellation of three satellites will have better coverage properties than a fixed two-satellite constellation for more than 80% of the time.