18 October 2010

More of the same with LifeGraphs

I completed Air War College, 17th Edition this month! I'm pursuing my ITIL Expert certification now and have two classes behind me. My near term goal is a paper for the International Astronautical Congress in Cape Town, South Africa next October. I have six months to write what I think will be the only paper on the general solution to spanning user-defined, hollow spheroids with an arbitrary number of points that are isogonal and equidistant. The purpose of the paper is to use the solution to the spanning problem as the objective function for a constellation of satellites equal in number to the points chosen for a spanned hollow spheroid that are unperturbed by J2, the Moon, etc. The constellation problem is to size, orient and phase the satellites to best match the singular solution. This is not a trivial problem for arbitrary N Earth orbiting satellites.

The motivation for this research is based on the idea of an Earth Outer Space Traffic Control System that has a transparent infrastructure being this isogonal and equidistant constellation, which is supplemented with platforms (orbiting and based elsewhere) carrying sensors for telecommunications, navigation and surveillance like the core constellation. The heavy-traffic orbital regimes, which will vary over a day to a solar cycle (11 years) will dictate where the EOSTCS needs to be augmented.

Suffice it to say, I hope to use X3D to render the spanning volume results and the inter-satellite parameters of the candidate constellations that seek to match the isogonal and equidistant (wrt to nearest neighbors) spanned volume.

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