Design and robust scheduling of nano-satellite swarm for synthetic aperture radar applications

This paper presents the design and robust scheduling of nano-satellite (nanosat) swarm for synthetic aperture radar (SAR) applications. Based on power budget and bandwidth limit of nanosats, the nanosats´ form factor and swarm size are chosen to ensure requirements on ground resolution and signal-to-noise ratio. An energy-efficient and robust scheduling considering stochastic failures is proposed using scenario optimization with convexification. The effectiveness of our proposed scheduling approach is verified with mathematical rigor as well as extensive simulation results on a realistic SAR application using strip and spot modes.