Autonomous Mission Planning for OLFAR: A Satellite Swarm in Lunar Orbit for Radio Astronomy

Orbiting Low Frequency Array for Radio Astronomy (OLFAR) is a radio astronomy mission that has been studied since 2010 by several Dutch universities and research institutes. The mission aims at producing sky maps by collecting cosmic signals at ultra-low wavelengths regimes, below the 30 MHz frequency band. A satellite swarm comprising more than...

Lunar Orbit Design of a Satellite Swarm for Radio Astronomy

Employing a satellite swarm for radio astronomy has been continuously addressed in the Orbiting Low Frequency ARray (OLFAR) project. A 100 km diameter of aperture array constructed by distributed satellites will be able to provide sky maps of better than 1 arc-minute spatial resolution at 10 MHz. However, an orbit design strategy for the...