One-to-Many SPS Design (Rover Fleet)

[darianvp]

In this issue I start to develop the model so that it can accommodate SPS designs which service a fleet of rovers

[darianvp]

Newest version of SPS design tool allows user to specify a target which consists of a group of N identical rovers clustered together with a certain separation, s. Assuming that the rovers are arranged in a regular grid with a separation s, the minimum allowable beam diameter which will cover the rovers (implemented in the script as the "fleet radius") is given by the equation:

Even non-square fleet sizes are assumed to fit within the same area as this configuration (that is why taking the ceiling of square root of N).

This value is used in place of the receiver radius in application of the pointing constraint. The mean link efficiency and power delivered to each independent rover is calculated.

The rover fleet is selected by typing in the keyword 'fleet' into the rover_selection variable, alongside an integer number (must be integer) representing the number of rovers in the fleet. The separation is also specified in the rover_selection string by writing the keyword 'separation' alongside the distance in meters (must be a decimal float number). An example is:

rover_selection = '2 fleet curiosity 1.0 separation'

[darianvp]

In the case that the maximum beam size is smaller than what is required to cover the entire fleet of rovers, the design point is removed. This can sometimes mean that lower altitude orbits are removed solely based on the size of the rover fleet as a target, and not the other constraints which characteristically remove low altitude orbits. This might be addressable by changing the acceptable bounds on the transmitter aperture size when considering a fleet target