Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
interspersed among periods of very high activity? In other words, is there
the equivalent of regularly scheduled meetings?
6.
Must all dialogs be originated from a well-defined issue or concern, or can
some arise from general topics of interest, for example, as a mechanism
for developing and/or sharing knowledge among the various constellation
7.
How does a new constellation member join the community of agent
groups? A new spacecraft may have improved methodologies or algorithms
useful to the entire constellation. Would an agent dialog be initiated so it
can share its new knowledge with the entire constellation?
8.
Since the existing constellation members may “learn” new things in the
course of their day-to-day activities, how do they share this knowledge
with the other members so it becomes generally available? Prior to its
absorption by the rest of the constellation, would other members be re-
sponsible for validating or QAing that new knowledge?
9.
Once the knowledge base of the constellation grows beyond its original as-
launched confines, how does this new “school-of-hard-knocks” knowledge
get passed on to new members?
10.
How does the constellation resolve differences between the new knowledge
carried by new members vs. the empirical experience gained inflight by
the old members?
11.
Could different members of the constellation take on special roles to
achieve general constellation goals? For example, could a subset of constel-
lation members (equipped with higher capacity flight computers) conduct
simulations or long-term studies of interest to the constellation as a whole?
12.
For a communications satellite constellation, one can assume all mem-
bers of the constellation will be at least compatible, if not identical. So
interface incompatibility among members should not be a problem. How-
ever, suppose in the future it is desirable to form at least a temporary
constellation of science satellites to engage in an observation campaign to
study a celestial object or phenomenon of great scientific import. By what
means could this goal be enabled or facilitated through the use of Remote
Agents, and what special interface/architecture issues obtain?
The full impact of these issues for constellations is beyond the scope of
this topic. Here we will simply consider a high-level (and perhaps overly sim-
plified) scenario for constellation member interactions purely for the purpose
of illustrating how constellation behavior might be supported by the proposed
FSW design. To this end, assume the following is the case:
1.
The constellation consists of a set of 16 LEO Sun-synchronous and four
GEO weather satellites (the fourth is a spare).
2.
The OBCs of the larger GEOs have oversized processing power to enable
transfer of LEO overflow processing, conduct background long-term studies
and simulations, and manage overall direction of constellation behavior.
