The combination of shrinking government budgets, increasing scrutiny of cost and schedule overruns, and the need to rapidly deliver new operational missionsas well as the replacement and augmentation of current systemsis creating a perfect storm in the form of demands for a different approach to delivering reliable in-orbit operations and end-user applications.
Small Satellites: Many Pluses
Small satellites are acknowledged for occupying a well-established niche for science, technology demonstration, and Earth observation missions. Additionally, as their utility grows, they are increasingly being baselined as solutions for MaG (Military and Government) operational and commercial applications.
Customers are signing up for missions with established small satellite vendors to take advantage of a wide range of cost and schedule benefits. While there will always be an enduring need for satellites whose challenging mission requirements demand a highly customized solution, most missions do not need to carry the high level of cost and schedule risk and mission assurance paperwork associated with these types of programs.
Small satellite development and delivery programs typically span less than 24 months from kickoff to launch readiness, enabling a rapid exploitation of data; and because of the short timeline of small satellite projects, customers benefit from the latest enhancements to proven heritage spacecraft technology.
Use of commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) technologies and processes, which are generally more readily available and have been proven to be robust and reliable in high-volume terrestrial applications, also leads to reduced mission cost, schedule, and risk.
Launch costs of small satellites are naturally lower than those of large satellites due to the smaller spacecraft size and mass. Also, small spacecraft that have been designed to be compatible with a range of launchers are able to readily take advantage of opportunistic piggyback launch capacity. Multiple small spacecraft can also be manifested on a single launch to accelerate a systems operational status and coverage, and once on-orbit, autonomous spacecraft reduce operational costs by eliminating the need for 24/7 manned support.
Continuity + Assurance
One area in which small satellites are ready to make an immediate impact is in the replenishment of aging remote sensing satellites. The anticipated failure of key U.S. weather satellitessuch as those used to track and forecast the progress of last Octobers Hurricane Sandyand the slipping launch dates of replacement polar-orbiting environmental spacecraft, such as LDCM and JPSS-1, mean there will be coverage gaps that could be readily filled by small satellites which are already able to provide Landsat-like imagery.
These small satellites are significantly quicker to implement and offer price points in the region of $15 million for a Surrey DMC missionand will be certainly far easier to finance.
Since 2008, when NASA and the U.S. Geological Survey started providing free access to Landsats image database, international governments, research organizations, and commercial firms have used Landsats scientific data for environmental and resource management, climate change monitoring, and the creation of new data applications.
There are more financing demands on the horizon for Earth observation programs in the form of replacement spacecraft, data storage facilities, global transmission infrastructure, the creation of data processing and analysis tools, and the training of the talent and expertise required to manage the increasingly complex architecture.
Dr. John Paffett, CEO of Surrey Satellite Technology US (SST-US), part of the larger Surrey Satellite group of companies (Surrey), said that while the industry acknowledges the global benefits of making Landsat data available and accessible worldwide, he firmly believes that there is no such thing as a free lunch.
He said that a lower-cost infrastructure will ensure the long-term viability of the data capture and provision supply chain. A sustainable business model is also essential to encourage more commercial firms, whose business models rely on the ability to provide time- and location-specific data on demand, to follow the lead of companies such as RapidEye AG, whose 5-satellite, 5-meter resolution agri-intelligence constellation was built by Surrey.
The low cost of small satellites, the ability to do more for less mass, and the economies of scale that can be achieved when building repeat bus designs make them highly suitable for constellation applications that can provide higher performance at a lower total cost than a single large spacecraft.
Constellations of lower-cost small satellites can surpass the services currently being provided by single large satellites by providing faster revisit times, greater data generation and delivery, as well as providing redundancy at the constellation level and continuity of service. Rapid rebuild times also allow for swift replacement of end-of-life spacecraft.
Maritime domain awareness (MDA) is a growing area of interest in the geospatial intelligence community. Small satellite constellations can be used in tandem to augment existing MDA systems to better meet user timelines and maritime needs. A system comprising a GEOEye Earth observation satellite, exactEarths Surrey-built eV-1 Automatic Identification System (AIS) satellite, and a Surrey synthetic aperture radar (SAR) satellite were unveiled at the 2012 SmallSat conference and highlighted the benefits of merging different spatial data sources to enhance situational awareness.
Surreys Recipe
Surrey differentiates itself from other small satellite manufacturers with its unique small satellite approach. For Surrey, the small satellite label applies to the size of the spacecraft produced as well as the philosophy and approach that permeate through all aspects of the mission. Surreys solutions encompass the design and manufacturing processes through to the organizational and management structures and the costing approaches applied consistently for all products and solutions, whether for the delivery of a satellite subsystem, a satellite bus, a turnkey single or multiple satellite mission, or a know-how transfer and training program.
Over the past 30 years and 39 satellites launched for a wide range of customers and end-user applications, Surreys success has been built on a handful of common-sense factors.
A one-size-fits-all approach to data and electrical interfaces sounds like a good ideain principlehowever, sounds like a good idea in principle, but just ends up building in unnecessary complexity, cost, and schedule risks into the bus design. Surreys approach is to maintain the baseline bus architecture and either use payload interface units to ensure compatibility between bus and payload, or work with the customer to incorporate interface changes early on in the design process.
Surreys heritage baseline approach allows for a balanced blend of low-risk, space-qualified designs to fly alongside newer developments, and use of dual-redundant avionics for critical systems, rather than a single, complex high-reliability unit, is a lower-cost and proven approach to providing in-orbit reliability and risk reduction.
Quality is the responsibility of the whole Surrey organization and is not isolated to just one departmentquality, performance verification, and mission assurance form integrated functions throughout the project and technical matrix.
About Surrey
Since the 1980s, Surrey has been the worlds leading developer of small satellite technologies and applications and from the early 1990s in particular, has leveraged rapid advances in bus and payload technology to reduce the costs for delivering reliable, high-performance solutions within short timescales. Surreys new leapfrog technology developments in high-resolution optics and sensors and in more efficient and agile bus avionics are being implemented on-board some of the latest systems to provide high-quality Earth observation imagery at a fraction of the price of previous systems. Examples include a constellation of three S-1 spacecraft delivering sub-meter imagery for a total of $160 million including launch and insurance; the agile SSTL-300-based NigeriaSat-2 providing 2.5-meter imagery for under $30 million; and the wide-area SSTL-100-based always on Earthmapper satellite providing global land coverage in five days for $7.5 million per spacecraft. Surreys 6-meter-resolution, all-weather, day-and-night NovaSAR system offers a market-leading swath-resolution-price solution that outperforms existing SAR systems.
Rapid evolution of heritage bus technologies are also supporting the delivery of low-latency AIS data at an unrivaled quality, as is being demonstrated by exactEarths Surrey-built MDA satellite, exactView-1 (EV-1).
This mission is the latest in a series of GNSS and weather programs that Surrey is supporting, following on from the 22 GNSS payloads being manufactured by Surrey for the European Galileo constellation, and the 8 SGR-ReSI radio occultation payloads being developed for NASAs Earth Venture-2 (EV-2) CYGNSS hurricane monitoring and prediction constellation.
Surrey Satellite Technology US LLC was established in 2008 to address the needs of the U.S. market and its customers for the provision of small satellite solutions, applications, and services. SST-US is stimulating the space industrys awareness, acceptance, and implementation of innovative models for delivering the immediate and future requirements of government, commercial, and entrepreneurial systems.
For more information about SST-US and to subscribe to SST-US updates and blogs, visit www.sst-us.com. Follow SST-US on Twitter: www.twitter.com/SurreySatUS. Follow SST-US on LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/ surrey-satellite-technology-us-llc