Applying the Tradespace Analysis Tool for Constellations (TAT-C) for Earth Science Mission Analysis

The rise of distributed spacecraft missions enables government agencies and commercial entities to provide innovative Earth observing services from low Earth orbit. The miniaturization of spacecraft, fueled by their relatively low cost of development and launch costs, is changing the traditional space mission design paradigm from monolithic missions to distributed space missions. Nowadays, spacecraft mission design comprises a vast number of small spacecraft. However, designing constellations with many spacecraft is complex because the number of design alternatives increases combinatorially with the number of satellites. Designers rely on modeling and simulation tools to evaluate design performance in a simulation environment, allowing them to perform tradespace analysis from a large number of mission architectures. This paper presents the Tradespace Analysis Tool for Constellations (TAT-C), an open-source tool that evaluates space mission architectures in a simulation environment. We run simulations using TAT-C's main services: revisit times and data latency. TAT-C proved to be a useful tool to support future Earth observing mission tradespace analysis, focusing on snow observing missions as an example of external scientific data sets that can be used within the TAT-C simulations.