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Satellite Constellation Simulator

I have been playing around on my computer working on tools that might come in handy for laser communications applications- Link budget calculators, analysis of background levels space terminals will see in space to ground links, rigorously quantifying impact of jitter in pointing on links, and experimenting with turbulence simulations...

I was thinking about constellations and about how it would be useful to have a flexible way to visualize constellations of thousands of satellites and quickly extract useful numbers for given satellite pairs within the constellation- for instance satellite separation or relative velocities. As I thought about it, I realized I could adapt tools I had to create such a viewer!

The attached video shows the viewer I put together on my home computer- In this example I input the proposed TeraWave constellation using the information from Blue Origin's FCC filing.

The first clip is a nicely rendered output video of the viewer tracking two satellites - on the left hand side the viewer outputs the orbital altitude, inclination of the orbit and which Plane the satellites A and B are in, the distance between the two satellites, their range rate, the resulting Doppler shift (at 1550nm), the tracking angle velocity in degrees/sec, the tracking angle acceleration. The output text is Green if the two satellites have line-of-sight to each other, red otherwise.

In the second clip I have turned off visibility of all but 2 planes- both with 82.5 degrees inclination with very high relative velocity. (You may need to go to full-screen to see text and markers) The second clip is a screen recording of the live display as I advance time steps around the time of closest approach between the two satellites.

The final clip shows the full constellation again, and again its a screen recording showing how you can quickly select which 2 satellites you want data for- at one point I select 2 satellites in the same plane and- as you would expect the relative range rate, doppler shift, tracking velocity and acceleration all go to zero.

It is still a work in progress, and I am still running tests to make sure there are no bugs, but I think it could be a useful tool!

I had to make some assumptions on some things that were not quantified in the FCC filing- so this video is just for demonstration purposes only...

Satellite Constellation Simulator

I have been playing around on my computer working on tools that might come in handy for laser communications applications- Link budget calculators, analysis of background levels space terminals will see in space to ground links, rigorously quantifying impact of jitter in pointing on links, and experimenting with turbulence simulations...

I was thinking about constellations and about how it would be useful to have a flexible way to visualize constellations of thousands of satellites and quickly extract useful numbers for given satellite pairs withing the constellation- for instance satellite separation or relative velocities. As I thought about it, I realized I could adapt tools I had to create such a viewer!

The attached video shows the viewer I put together on my home computer- In this example I input the proposed TeraWave constellation using the information from Blue Origin's FCC filing.

The first clip is a nicely rendered output video of the viewer tracking two satellites - on the left hand side the viewer outputs the orbital altitude, inclination of the orbit and which Plane the satellites A and B are in, the distance between the two satellites, their range rate, the resulting Doppler shift (at 1550nm), the tracking angle velocity in degrees/sec, the tracking angle acceleration. The output text is Green if the two satellites have line-of-sight to each other, red otherwise.

In the second clip I have turned off visibility of all but 2 planes- both with 82.5 degrees inclination with very high relative velocity. (You may need to go to full-screen to see text and markers) The second clip is a screen recording of the live display as I advance time steps around the time of closest approach between the two satellites.

The final clip shows the full constellation again, and again its a screen recording showing how you can quickly select which 2 satellites you want data for- at one point I select 2 satellites in the same plane and- as you would expect the relative range rate, doppler shift, tracking velocity and acceleration all go to zero.

It is still a work in progress, and I am still running tests to make sure there are no bugs, but I think it could be a useful tool!

I had to make some assumptions on some things that were not quantified in the FCC filing- so this video is just for demonstration purposes only...

Satellite Constellation Simulator

I have been playing around on my computer working on tools that might come in handy for laser communications applications- Link budget calculators, analysis of background levels space terminals will see in space to ground links (see THIS article ), rigorously quantifying impact of jitter in pointing on links, and experimenting with turbulence simulations...

I was thinking about constellations and about how it would be useful to have a flexible way to visualize constellations of thousands of satellites and quickly extract useful numbers for given satellite pairs withing the constellation- for instance satellite separation or relative velocities. As I thought about it, I realized I could adapt tools I had to create such a viewer!

The attached video shows the viewer I put together on my home computer- In this example I input the proposed TeraWave constellation using the information from Blue Origin's FCC filing.

The first clip is a nicely rendered output video of the viewer tracking two satellites - on the left hand side the viewer outputs the orbital altitude, inclination of the orbit and which Plane the satellites A and B are in, the distance between the two satellites, their range rate, the resulting Doppler shift (at 1550nm), the tracking angle velocity in degrees/sec, the tracking angle acceleration. The output text is Green if the two satellites have line-of-sight to each other, red otherwise.

In the second clip I have turned off visibility of all but 2 planes- both with 82.5 degrees inclination with very high relative velocity. (You may need to go to full-screen to see text and markers) The second clip is a screen recording of the live display as I advance time steps around the time of closest approach between the two satellites.

The final clip shows the full constellation again, and again its a screen recording showing how you can quickly select which 2 satellites you want data for- at one point I select 2 satellites in the same plane and- as you would expect the relative range rate, doppler shift, tracking velocity and acceleration all go to zero.

It is still a work in progress, and I am still running tests to make sure there are no bugs, but I think it could be a useful tool!

I had to make some assumptions on some things that were not quantified in the FCC filing- so this video is just for demonstration purposes only...