Mission planning for a non-homogeneous Earth observation satellite constellation for disaster response

Nicolas Holvoet (1) , Wasanchai Vongsantivanich (2) , Supatcha Chaimatanan (1) , Daniel Delahaye (1)

1 ENAC - Ecole Nationale de l'Aviation Civile
2 GISTDA - Geo-Informatics and Space Technology Development Agency

This article explores the mission planning problem for a constellation of non-homogeneous Earth observation satellites for disaster response to promote cooperation in the Asia-Pacific region between different space agencies or satellite operators. Given a set of weighted requests consisting of a polygonal area, a list of collaborating satellites and a time horizon, the goal is first to compute the observation opportunities and then to plan a sequence of acquisitions for each sensor to optimize the total coverage in the first days to help the disaster management agencies. The non-homogeneous satellites (non-agile or agile) and the different orbits result in a huge combinatorial search space. A simplified computational method is proposed to generate the observation opportunities and a metaheuristic based on the Simulated Annealing algorithm is used to solve the mission planning problem. Real requests from disaster management agencies are used to evaluate the proposed methodology.

Domaines: Traitement du signal et de l'image [eess.SP]

Nicolas Holvoet, Wasanchai Vongsantivanich, Supatcha Chaimatanan, Daniel Delahaye. Mission planning for a non-homogeneous Earth observation satellite constellation for disaster response. SpaceOps 2018, May 2018, Marseille, France. pp.978-1-62410-562-3, ⟨10.2514/6.2018-2658⟩. ⟨hal-01812116⟩