Development of a Low Earth Orbit Mission Preliminary Analysis Tool

Abstract: The objective of this project is the development of a mission analysis tool for the nanosatellite company GomSpace Sweden. Although there are many existing software, they can be quite complicated and time consuming to use. The goal of this work is to build a simple app to be used at the earliest stages of space missions in order to obtain key figures of merit quickly and easily. By comparing results, assessing the feasibility of customer needs, analysing how various parameters affect each other, it enables immediate deeper understanding of the implications of the main design decisions that are taken at the very beginning of a mission. The tool shall aid the system engineering process of determining orbit manoeuvre capability specifically for CubeSat electric propulsion systems taking into account the most relevant factors for perturbation in Low Earth Orbit (LEO), i.e. atmospheric drag and Earth’s oblateness effects. The manoeuvres investigated are: orbit raising from an insert orbit to an operating orbit, orbit maintenance, deorbiting within the space debris mitigation guidelines and collision avoidance within the 12 to 24 hours that the system has to react. The manoeuvres cost is assessed in terms of Delta v requirements, propellant mass and transfer times. The tool was developed with MATLAB and packaged as a standalone Linux application.