Geocentric Spherical Surfaces Emulating the Geostationary Orbit at Any Latitude with Zenith Links

Emilio Matricciani
Additional contact information
Emilio Matricciani: Dipartimento di Elettronica, Informazione e Bioingegneria (DEIB), Politecnico di Milano, Piazza Leonardo da Vinci, 32, 20133 Milan, Italy

Future Internet, 2020, vol. 12, issue 1, 1-11

Abstract: According to altitude, the orbits of satellites constellations can be divided into geostationary Earth orbit (GEO), medium Earth orbit (MEO), and low Earth orbit (LEO) constellations. We propose to use a Walker star constellation with polar orbits, at any altitude, to emulate the geostationary orbit with zenith paths at any latitude. Any transmitter/receiver will be linked to a satellite as if the site were at the equator and the satellite at the local zenith. This constellation design can have most of the advantages of the current GEO, MEO, and LEO constellations, without having most of their drawbacks. Doppler phenomena are largely minimized because the connected satellite is always seen almost at the local zenith. The extra free-space loss, due to the fixed pointing of all antennas, is at most 6 dBs when the satellite enters or leaves the service area. The connections among satellites are easy because the positions in the orbital plane and in adjacent planes are constant, although with variable distances. No steering antennas are required. The tropospheric propagation fading and scintillations are minimized. Our aim is to put forth the theoretical ideas about this design, to which we refer to as the geostationary surface (GeoSurf) constellation.

Keywords: satellite constellations; walker star; GeoSurf; zenith paths (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O3 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/1999-5903/12/1/16/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/1999-5903/12/1/16/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jftint:v:12:y:2020:i:1:p:16-:d:310375

Access Statistics for this article

Future Internet is currently edited by Ms. Grace You

More articles in Future Internet from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().