Ad hoc CubeSat constellations: Secondary launch coverage and distribution

The primary purpose of a constellation is to obtain global measurements with improved spatial and temporal resolution. The small size, low cost, standardized form factor, and increasing availability of commercial parts for CubeSats make them ideal for use in constellations. However, without taking advantage of secondary payload opportunities, it would be costly to launch and distribute a CubeSat constellation into a specific configuration. A cost-effective way to launch a constellation of CubeSats is via consecutive secondary payload launch opportunities, but the resulting constellation would be an ad hoc mix of orbit parameters. We focus on the feasibility of cobbling together constellation-like functionality from multiple secondary payload opportunities. Each participating CubeSat (or set of CubeSats) per launch could have completely different orbital parameters, even without propulsion onboard the CubeSats or intermediate transfer carriers. We look at the ground coverages that could be obtained for a constellation of five to six orbital planes with one to six satellites in each plane. We analyze past and announced future launch opportunities for CubeSats, including launch platforms supported by the NASA Educational Launch of Nanosatellites (ELaNa). We consider combinations of possible launch locations and temporal spacings over the course of one year and simulate the resulting ground coverage patterns and revisit times for an ad hoc constellation using these launch opportunities. We perform this analysis for two separate case studies - one with only US launches and one with both US and non-US opportunities - and vary the number of satellites per orbital plane. Typical CubeSat mission lifetimes and deorbit times for low-altitude orbits are included in these analyses. The ad hoc constellation results are compared to coverage from uniformly-placed LEO constellations and are quantified in terms of revisit time, time to 100% global coverage, and response time. For mu- tiple satellites per orbital plane, we identify the required delta-V and expected time to distribute these CubeSats in non-traditional constellation architectures. We find that using secondary launches for opportunistic ad hoc CubeSat constellations, if not limited to US-only opportunities, can decrease global satellite revisit time when compared with a uniform Walker constellation (6 hours versus 8 hours for the Walker constellation). The ad hoc constellation is slightly less optimal than the Walker constellation in terms of response time (13 hours versus 12 hours) and time to complete global coverage (12 hours versus 10 hours), but the performance is comparable.