Low-Thrust Reconfiguration Strategy for Flexible Satellite Constellations

Flexible and responsive space systems are needed to satisfy changing mission requirements and react to unforeseen challenges. Reconfigurable constellations are a promising approach to overcome limitations of the current design philosophy, offering operators the ability to actively adapt the constellation configuration to future needs, promptly modifying their pattern to focus the available resources towards dynamic objectives. This work introduces a low-thrust reconfiguration strategy to optimize these constellations through a multiobjective Genetic Algorithm able to trade-off between observation performance over a desired target area and maneuvering cost to reach the new pattern. The presented approach is validated in a LEO scenario, considering the reconfiguration from a global coverage to a regional one. The obtained results are compared with the ones available in literature to show the suitability of the proposed solution