Paper Category: Statistical Analysis and Application
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Ensuring Orbital Safety from T-0: The Critical Imperative for Immediate Post-Launch Collision Avoidance
As the density of the Low Earth Orbit (LEO) environment increases, driven by frequent rideshare missions and the deployment of mega-constellations, the initial phase of satellite operations has emerged as a period of heightened orbital risk. Historically, collision avoidance (COLA) processes have relied on established tracking by Space Situational Awareness (SSA) providers. However, this study…
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Autonomous FSM Architecture for Commissioning and Differential Drag Control in CubeSat Formations
The operational success of inter-satellite laser link (ISL) missions in CubeSat constellations depends on the strict management of conflicting requirements: energy harvesting, high-precision payload targeting, and orbital maintenance. This paper presents an automated onboard mission logic designed to manage the relative distance of a two-satellite 6U in formation flight (ranging from 100 km to 1000…
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Deriving Mission-Specific Radiation Test Fluence Targets from Orbital Survivability Requirements
Standard radiation hardness assurance methodologies prescribe fixed heavy-ion test fluences, typically 10^7 ions/cm2, to screen for Destructive Single Event Effects (DSEE). This paper examines the statistical and physical foundations behind this number. We show that a radiation test is a sequence of Bernoulli trials whose aggregate behaviour is described by the Poisson distribution, establishing a…
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Thermal Data Interoperability for Small Satellite Missions: Integrating CAD, ETMS, and STEP-TAS
The rapid development cycles of small satellite missions require the transition from isolated engineering practices to a continuous, concurrent or model-based systems engineering (MBSE) approach. A significant bottleneck remains in thermal engineering, where the manual translation of mechanical designs into thermal models- and the exchange of thermal models between different software environments – often leads…
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The Final Barrier to High-Performance Computing in Space: Architectures for Mitigating Catastrophic Radiation Effects
The increasing ambition of commercial and institutional space missions is driving demand for onboard computing capabilities far beyond traditional spacecraft avionics. Applications such as orbital data centers, large satellite constellations, autonomous mission operations, and real time data processing increasingly depend on high performance GPUs, advanced processors, high density solid state storage, and complex commercial electronic…