A survey of small satellites domain: challenges, applications and communications key issues
Résumé
Traditional satellite missions are extremely expensive to design, build, launch and operate. Consequently, b the aerospace industry and the research community have started directing their attention to missions invol many, small, distributed and inexpensive satellites. Furthermore, many space projects in universities laboratories are focused on the development of micro-, nano- and pico-satellites for both scientific and educational purposes. New concepts arise as small satellite domain imposes itself as a particular field. Therefore, concepts such a constellation, cluster, and swarm became popular because of their potential to perform coordinated measurements for remote control missions and its capacity of long-term mission. The first part of this paper discusses the complementary aspects of conventional satellites and small satelli The reminder of the paper is organized as follows. Section III presents small satellite challenges while Sect IV reveals the numerous applications of small satellites. Section V describes formation flying concept and outlines the advantages and disadvantages of satellite distributed systems. Finally, routing approaches for nanosatellite networks are discussed in Section VI.