On the use of Small Satellites for Operational Responsive Space Missions

As the warfighter moves through the 21st century, an Operational Responsive Space (ORS) segment can bring significant force advantages. These benefits support diverse missions providing the combat commander enhancements such as ISR data, data exfiltration, current weather and terrain mappings, container or ship tracking as well as others such as hyperspectral or multispectral imaging. While the ORS segment contains many diverse and interesting aspects, this paper addresses the basic deployment and mission capabilities while focusing on the orbital parameters, communications requirements and the resulting information exchange capacities and capabilities. This work further describes using Programmable Modems (or Software Defined Radios (SDR)) with Radiation Hardened (RH) properties. An offered conclusion and suggested additional areas of study round out the paper.