Data from Earth observation satellites for close monitoring of both natural and man-made rapidly changing events is continuously increasing. Services for e.g. disaster monitoring, crisis management, border surveillance, but also traffic control and environmental protection require the ability to respond quickly and effectively to unforeseen events. The Institute of Astronautics (LRT) at Technische Universitaet Muenchen (TUM) has analyzed concepts and developed technologies with the scope to allow continuous, long duration real-time Earth observation. This is achieved by interactively teleoperating a satellite in Low Earth Orbit (LEO) via geostationary Data Relay Satellite (DRS). Utilizing one DRS, acquisition times can be extended to approximately 50 minutes every orbit while ground station passes are limited to about 10 minutes, roughly twice a day. Even though DRS services are already frequently available for communication between ground stations and are occasionally used by satellites for payload data transmission, civilian low latency real-time controlled systems utilizing this service have not been deployed yet. This paper discusses potential applications and new possibilities of long duration real-time Earth observation w.r.t. top level requirements and their impact on the real-time communication chain. To evaluate the feasibility and quality of real-time Earth observation via DRS, all scenarios are compared with the performance achievable using ground station networks. The impact of the communication architecture on the Quality of Service is analyzed by stochastically evaluating the System Response Time of different exemplary scenarios.     «

Data from Earth observation satellites for close monitoring of both natural and man-made rapidly changing events is continuously increasing. Services for e.g. disaster monitoring, crisis management, border surveillance, but also traffic control and environmental protection require the ability to respond quickly and effectively to unforeseen events. The Institute of Astronautics (LRT) at Technische Universitaet Muenchen (TUM) has analyzed concepts and developed technologies with the scope to allo...     »