Package Overview

This package contain set of modules to compute mission-data of satellites. It can be used to perform the following calculations:

  1. Generation of satellite orbits from constellation specifications.

  2. Computation of propagated satellite state (position and velocity) data.

  3. Generation of grid points at a (user-defined or auto) angular resolution over region of interest.

  4. Grid Coverage: Computation of satellite access intervals over given set of grid points (grid-coverage) for the length of the mission.

    1. With consideration of satellite/sensor pointing (orientation) directions.

    2. With consideration of sensor field-of-view (FOV) and field-of-regard (FOR).

  5. Pointing-options Coverage: Computation of coverage in which set of pointing-options of the satellite/instrument are specified and accessed ground-locations (intersection of the pointing-axis with the Earth’s surface) is calculated.

  6. Pointing-options with Grid Coverage: Grid Coverage calculated for different satellite/instrument orientations.

  7. Computation of inter-satellite communication (line-of-sight) time intervals.

  8. Computation of ground-station contact time intervals.

  9. Computation of satellite eclipse time-intervals.

  10. Sensor pixel-array projection to simulated Level-2 satellite imagery.

The orbitpy package is built on top of the propcov package available in the propcov folder. Please refer to the README.MD file within the propcov folder for description of the respective package.

References

    1. Ravindra, R. Ketzner, S. Nag, “Earth Observation Simulator (EO-SIM): An Open-Source Software for Observation Systems Design”, IEEE International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium, Brussels Belgium, July 2021.

Glossary of terms used in the package

  • Satellite and spacecraft are synonymous.

  • Instrument, payload and sensor are synonymous.

  • Grid-point, ground-point and target-point synonymous.

  • Data-metrics and Observation-metrics are synonymous.

  • Access vs Coverage

    • Sometimes access and coverage are used synonymously.

    • Other times access refers to a target falling under a sensor FOV while coverage includes an additional condition that the satellite should be able to be make an observation.