A mission planning approach for crosslink-enabled earth sensing satellite constellations

Current interest in spacecraft constellations for government and commercial uses continues to drive advancement in sophistication, capability, and mission complexity. As these systems proliferate, they require increased levels of automation to properly orchestrate in achieving the mission objectives. This paper develops a constellation planning capability for cross-link enabled Geospatial Intelligence missions. The planning for constellation coordination is performed using a two-level network flow approach, where the first level creates a communication plan, and the second layer determines the Earth sensing activities. A network flow method is used to simultaneously obtain a schedule for each unique satellite within the constellation and provides an optimal operational schedule for the entire cooperative system.