ISS team wins first place in designing Mars exploration satellite communications

An Illinois Space Society team has won first place in a satellite constellation design competition that the Students for the Exploration and Development of Space (SEDS) and Society of Satellite Professionals International (SSPI) has sponsored.

Members of the ISS team will travel to Boston in November for the SpaceVision 2015 conference to receive the award. Eleven teams from 10 universities competed in the challenge. Members of the SSPI mentored the teams on the work, then chose three winners.

The 15-member ISS team prepared “MOSAIC: Mars Orbiting Satellites for Advanced Interplanetary Communication,” a 55-page report, with the help of mentor and SSPI member Denis Curtin.

“The competition required us to create a satellite architecture that would provide communications coverage for robotic and eventually manned exploration of Mars in the most cost effective manner possible,” said team leader Christopher Lorenz. “Our chosen architecture utilizes a build-up approach that uses small satellites to provide initial coverage, with eventual addition of large relay satellites.”

The first phase of the ISS team’s three-phased plan called for up to 61.2 percent coverage of Mars by 2025 with the launching of four small satellites every two years into low orbits around the planet. The second phase, beginning in 2029, would launch four small satellites every 780 days into higher orbits around Mars, to provide 100 percent continuous coverage. Phase three was designed to cover the gap Phase Two encounters when the Sun blocks communication between Earth and Mars. The third phase, launched in 2033, would station a Solar Eclipse Relay satellite at the Sun-Earth Lagrange 4 point to provide 100 percent coverage while the Sun is directly between Earth and Mars.

In addition to Lorenz, other ISS team members were:

• Alexandra Bacula
• Alexander Case
• Benjamin Collins
• Zachary Fester
• Brian Hardy
• Yukti Kathuria
• Andrew Koehler
• Steven Macenski
• Joseph Miceli
• Jordan Murphy
• Jeffrey Pekosh
• Kaushik Ponnapalli
• Lui Suzuki
• Kelsey White