Earth Observation Simulator (EO-Sim): An Open-Source Software for Observation Systems Design

This paper presents the Earth Observation Simulator (EO-Sim), a software framework which facilitates the design of novel observation systems. EO-Sim allows exploration of observing strategies by facilitating users to configure and simulate heterogenous satellite constellations. A set of potential observation opportunities and the associated observation metrics during mission-operations can be generated by the simulations. EO-Sim also incorporates an observation simulator to mock the operation of instruments taking into consideration the instrument specifications and observation geometry. A beta version has been made available to the public.

1. Introduction

The capabilities of Earth Observation (EO) missions have seen steady growth in the past many years, assisted by developments of small-satellite bus (e.g. the 3U, 6U, 12U CubeSat and microsat bus from Blue Canyon [1]), new instruments (e.g. compact Ka band precipitation radar [2]), large inter-connected ground-station networks (e.g. Amazon Web Service Ground Station [3]), intersatellite communications [4], onboard data processing (e.g. SpaceCube [5]) and reduced launch costs (e.g. launch services from SpaceX, Rocketlabs). These technological capabilities further allow development of new observation systems involving intelligent and collaborative constellations [6].