COSMO-SkyMed Full Constellation Orbital Flexibility and Interferometric Capabilities

COSMO-SkyMed is an Earth Observation space program funded by the Italian Ministry of Research and Italian Ministry of Defence (It-MoD) and conducted by the Italian Space Agency (ASI) in conjunction with It-MoD. In November 2010 the fourth and last COSMO-SkyMed satellite was successfully launched and integrated into the constellation after the positive conclusion of the commissioning phase in January 2011. The four satellites are placed in the same sun-synchronous dawn-dusk frozen orbit, designed in such a way to fulll dual needs and to optimize the performances for a wide range of Civilian applications (e.g. risks management, agriculture/forestry, marine/coastal, geology) and Defence applications (surveillance, intelligence, crisis management, mission planning). Currently the orbital configuration is composed of three satellites (namely PFM, FM#2 and FM#4) with a dierence of 90 deg in their respective anomalies, and a fourth satellite (namely FM#3) in tandem-like conguration with FM#2 (i.e. one-day temporal decorrelation). The aim of this paper is to analyze the orbital fexibility of COSMO- SkyMed constellation by performing a survey of the possible orbital interferometric congurations which could be achieved by the full COSMO-SkyMed constellation (e.g. tandem, tandem-like, double one-day tandem conguration, etc), focusing on their main features (e.g. interferometric data takes opportunities, temporal decorrelation, degradation of the temporal performances respect to the nominal equi-phased conguration, etc), highlighting the propellant required for orbital conguration changes and the ways to minimize it, associating them with the main state-of-the-art Civilian and Defence applications that would benefit from them and providing a preliminary quantitative assessment of the interferometric products quality improvement for each orbital configuration.