Mission design and analysis of a PocketQube swarm mission for distributed beamforming

A tendency towards miniaturisation of electronics, along with a reduction in launch costs, have enabled the growth of miniaturised spacecraft missions. Satellites such as CubeSats have widened access to space, with several missions already operating in orbit and many more being planned. Still, even smaller sub-CubeSat-sized spacecraft such as PocketQubes and ChipSats could enable unprecedented missions that are not possible with traditional-sized satellites. One of these applications is distributed beamforming where, instead of deploying a spacecraft with a single large antenna, a swarm of satellites is used as a distributed antenna array to obtain an electronically steerable beam. This paper introduces for the first time the mission design and analysis of a distributed beamforming mission adopting PocketQube satellites. First, it details the low Earth orbit dynamics of a PocketQube swarm formed by a chief node and a cloud of deputy nodes, including the analysis of the orbital perturbations. The swarm dynamics is coupled to the beamforming principles and characteristics to assess the performance of the PocketQube swarm to achieve beamforming.