Present and future of constellation and formation flight of small satellites

摘要

Concerning spacebome optical sensor, observation is often very difficult due to cloud. Concerning spaceborne microwave sensor, atmospheric, ocean, sea ice and other conditions change very often. In both cases, constellation is needed. Examples of the former are Rapid eye, Hodoyoshi and Uniform. Examples of the latter are GPM, Topex poseidon. Moreover, formation flight is needed to observe larger area of a plane around the earth such as cluster and to get DEM such as TerraSAR-X and TanDEM-X. In this paper, present and future of constellation and formation flight are presented.