Constellation of small spacecraft for radio occultation probing of ionosphere and atmosphere

The technique of radio occultation probing of the ionosphere and the atmosphere of the Earth is based on radio probing at “satellite-satellite” routes. As the satellites orbit, the propagation line of radio waves scans the ionosphere and atmosphere along the altitude of the radio transmitter beam. Analysis of the signal transmitted through the atmospheric slice provides insight on the state of the environment such as data on the electron content, temperature, density, pressure, humidity and movement of atmospheric slices. The environment parameters recovery (the inverse solution) is solved by variations of the signal amplitude and phase while passing through the atmospheric environment.

Meteorologists set the requirement to measure the atmosphere parameters of the land area 500 × 500 km for a reliable forecast. Given that the geosphere surface area is approximately 500 · 106 km², we can take that there are about 2,000 such areas. Estimates show that the number of radio occultation measurements of one SS of GNSS GLONASS and GPS is 1300–1400 daily. Hence, if the interval between measurements in each area of 500 × 500 km should be 3 hours (i.e., the measurement rate is 8 times per calendar day), the radio-occultation probing sessions requirement will be at least 16,000 per day. In this scenario, a constellation of at least 12 SS is required.

We offer the constellation of 18 small satellites to guaranteed solve the problem of observation of the ionosphere and atmosphere