Satellites are vital in many industries and perform a host of vital functions that include communications, weather prediction, geolocation, national security defense, and many others. The capability to analyze satellites’ status, behavior, and performance is a critical task that is very valuable to its stakeholders. For example, in the Global Positioning System (GPS) it is common to compute a performance metric called Dilution of Precision (DOP), which is a measure of how well satellites are positioned above a particular location on the earth. A low DOP value represents ideal positions for the GPS satellites, which results in overall better performance for that location. In the GPS domain, analyzing DOP performance is a critical task not only for right now, but for the time in the future. How good will DOP be in Hawaii in a week if we remove two satellites from the constellation?

The student team will leverage the container technologies, open source visualization tools and frameworks, and Aerospace's Satellite Orbit Analysis Program (SOAP) to develop new capabilities that will automate common performance metrics, such as DOP for GPS and Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS). SOAP is Aerospace's interactive three-dimensional orbit visualization and analysis software package and is capable of simultaneously predicting the relative motion of up to 100,000 satellites, ground stations, vehicles, aircraft, ships, and planetary bodies using a diverse set of propagation methods.