Abstract Nowadays, constellations and distributed networks of satellites are emerging as clear development trends in the space system market to enable augmentation, enhancement, and possibilities of new applications for future Earth Observation (EO) missions. While the adoption of these satellite architectures is gaining momentum for the attaining of ever more stringent application requirements and stakeholder needs, the efforts to analyze their benefits and suitability, and to assess their impact for future programmes remains as an open challenge to the EO community. In this context, this paper presents the mission and system architecture conceived during the Horizon 2020 ONION project, a European Union research activity that proposes a systematic approach to the optimization of EO space infrastructures. In particular, ONION addressed the design of complementary assets that progressively supplement current programs and took part in the exploration of needs and implementation of architectures for the Copernicus Space Component for EO. Among several use cases considered, the ONION project focused on proposing system architectures to provide improved revisit time, data latency and image resolution for a demanding application scenario of interest: Marine Weather Forecast (MWF). A set of promising system architectures has been subject of a comprehensive assessment, based on mission analysis expertise and detailed simulation for evaluating several key parameters such as revisit time and data latency of each measurement of interest, on-board memory evolution and power budget of each satellite of the constellation, ground station contacts and inter-satellite links. The architectures are built with several heterogeneous satellite nodes distributed in different orbital planes. Each platform can embark different instrument sets, which provide the required measurements for each use case. A detailed mission analysis has then been performed to the selected architecture for the MWF use case, including a refined data flow analysis to optimize system resources; a refined power budget analysis; a delta-V and a fuel budget analysis considering all the possible phases of the mission. This includes from the correction of launcher injection errors and acquisition of nominal satellite position inside the constellation, orbit maintenance to control altitude, collision avoidance to avoid collision with space debris objects and end-of-life (EOL) disposal to comply with EOL guidelines. The relevance of the system architecture selected for the MWF has been evaluated for three use cases of interest (Arctic sea-ice monitoring, maritime fishery pressure and aquaculture, agricultural hydric stress) to show the versatility and the feasibility of the chosen architecture to be adapted for other EO applications.

中文翻译：

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地球观测卫星节点业务网络的任务和系统架构

摘要 如今，卫星星座和分布式卫星网络正在成为空间系统市场的明显发展趋势，为未来地球观测 (EO) 任务提供新应用的增强、增强和可能性。虽然这些卫星架构的采用正在获得越来越严格的应用要求和利益相关者需求的动力，但分析它们的好处和适用性以及评估它们对未来计划的影响的努力仍然是 EO 社区面临的一个公开挑战。在此背景下，本文介绍了 Horizo​​n 2020 ONION 项目中设想的任务和系统架构，这是一项欧盟研究活动，提出了一种优化 EO 空间基础设施的系统方法。特别是，ONION 解决了​​逐步补充当前计划的互补资产的设计，并参与了 EO 哥白尼空间组件的需求和架构实施的探索。在考虑的几个用例中，ONION 项目侧重于提出系统架构，以便为感兴趣的苛刻应用场景提供改进的重访时间、数据延迟和图像分辨率：海洋天气预报 (MWF)。基于任务分析专业知识和详细模拟，对一组有前景的系统架构进行了全面评估，以评估几个关键参数，例如每个感兴趣的测量的重访时间和数据延迟、板载存储器演变和每个测量的功率预算。星座的卫星、地面站联系和卫星间链接。这些架构由分布在不同轨道平面的多个异构卫星节点构建而成。每个平台都可以搭载不同的仪器组，为每个用例提供所需的测量。然后对 MWF 用例的选定架构进行了详细的任务分析，包括用于优化系统资源的精细数据流分析；精细的功率预算分析；一个 delta-V 和一个燃料预算分析，考虑到任务的所有可能阶段。这包括纠正发射器注入错误和获取星座内的标称卫星位置、轨道维护以控制高度、避免碰撞以避免与空间碎片物体碰撞以及报废 (EOL) 处置以符合 EOL 准则。