The SATURN mission, which ranked third in the “Future missioni CubeSat” call of the ALCOR programme, has recently achieved a significant milestone: passing the Preliminary Design Review (PDR) which marks the completion of the preliminary design phase.
Besides the Italian Space Agency (ASI) and OHB, project leader, the closing meeting was also attended by representatives of the partner companies and institutions, including ARESYS, AIRBUS and Politecnico di Milano.
In particular, the main objective of this mission is to demonstrate and validate the SAR technology in orbit based on a MIMO (Multiple Inputs Multiple Outputs) cooperative approach: a formation of 3 satellites flying on the same orbit and at an overall distance of a few hundred metres, equipped with an active SAR payload (transmission and reception). In this way, the synchronized transmission and reception of the three SARs will make it possible to recombine on-ground the data obtained from each single node of the swarm, thus ensuring very high performance. In this way, it will be possible to obtain a distributed and miniaturized SAR system that can overcome the limitations of a monolithic system and offer scalability and incremental performance based on the number of satellites included in the formation.
“The completion of the Preliminary Design Review lays the foundation for the creation of a highly challenging and innovative distributed and miniaturized SAR system based on CubeSat technologies. In this phase, the project team has successfully developed and tested three prototypes of some of the key technologies for the mission, thus demonstrating their technological maturity,” said enthusiastically Alberto Fedele, Project Manager of the Italian Space Agency for the SATURN mission.
