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© <2020>. This manuscript version is made available under the CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 license http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0, Nowadays, constellations and distributed networks of satellites are emerging as clear development trends in the space system market to enable augmentation, enhancement, and possibilities of new applications for future Earth Observation (EO) missions. While the adoption of these satellite architectures is gaining momentum for the attaining of ever more stringent application requirements and stakeholder needs, the efforts to analyze their benefits and suitability, and to assess their impact for future programmes remains as an open challenge to the EO community. In this context, this paper presents the mission and system architecture conceived during the Horizon 2020 ONION project, a European Union research activity that proposes a systematic approach to the optimization of EO space infrastructures. In particular, ONION addressed the design of complementary assets that progressively supplement current programs and took part in the exploration of needs and implementation of architectures for the Copernicus Space Component for EO. Among several use cases considered, the ONION project focused on proposing system architectures to provide improved revisit time, data latency and image resolution for a demanding application scenario of interest: Marine Weather Forecast (MWF). A set of promising system architectures has been subject of a comprehensive assessment, based on mission analysis expertise and detailed simulation for evaluating several key parameters such as revisit time and data latency of each measurement of interest, on-board memory evolution and power budget of each satellite of the constellation, ground station contacts and inter-satellite links. The architectures are built with several heterogeneous satellite nodes distributed in different orbital planes. Each platform can embark different instrument sets, which provide the required measurements for each use case. A detailed mission analysis has then been performed to the selected architecture for the MWF use ca, This project has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 687490., Peer Reviewed, Postprint (author's final draft)

Over the next few years, Europe will take important steps towards implementing the architecture of the Copernicus Space Component for Earth Observation (EO), fulfilling the needs of stakeholders concerned with land monitoring, marine monitoring, atmosphere monitoring, emergency management, security, and climate change. Nowadays, constellations and distributed networks of satellites are emerging as clear development trends in the space system market to enable augmentation, enhancement, and possibilities of new applications for future EO Missions. It is of paramount importance for Europe to properly analyse these trends and assess whether or not they could provide a competitive advantage for EO systems. The paper presents the mission and system architecture design of the H2020 ONION project, a European Union research activity that proposes a system concept to supplement in a progressive way the current European EO infrastructures and to serve emerging needs in an optimal fashion. Among several use cases considered, the ONION project focussed on proposing system architectures to provide competitive revisit time, data latency and image resolution for a demanding application scenario of interest: marine weather forecast (MWF). A set of promising system architectures has been subject of a comprehensive assessment, based on mission analysis expertise and detailed simulation for evaluating several key parameters such as revisit time and data latency of each measurement of interest, on-board memory evolution and power budget of each satellite of the constellation, ground station contacts and inter-satellite links. The architectures are built with several heterogeneous satellite nodes distributed in different orbital planes. Each platform can embark different instrument sets, which provide the required measurements for each use case. A detailed mission analysis has then been applied to the selected architecture for the MWF use case, including refined data flow analysis to opt, Postprint (author's final draft)

Earth observation satellite programs are currently facing, for some applications, the need to deliver hourly revisit times, subkilometric spatial resolutions, and near-real-time data access times. These stringent requirements, combined with the consolidation of small-satellite platforms and novel distributed architecture approaches, are stressing the need to study the design of new, heterogeneous, and heavily networked satellite systems that can potentially replace or complement traditional space assets. In this context, this paper presents partial results from ONION, a research project devoted to studying distributed satellite systems and their architecting characteristics. A design-oriented framework that allows selecting optimal architectures for the given user needs is presented in this paper. The framework has been used in the study of a strategic use-case and its results are hereby presented. From an initial design space of 5586 potential architectures, the framework has been able to preselect 28 candidate designs by an exhaustive analysis of their performance and by quantifying their quality attributes. This very exploration of architectures and the characteristics of the solution space are presented in this paper along with the selected solution and the results of a detailed performance analysis., Postprint (author's final draft)

An optimal payload selection conducted in the frame of the H2020 ONION project (id 687490) is presented based on the ability to cover the observation needs of the Copernicus system in the time period 2020–2030. Payload selection is constrained by the variables that can be measured, the power consumption, and weight of the instrument, and the required accuracy and spatial resolution (horizontal or vertical). It involved 20 measurements with observation gaps according to the user requirements that were detected in the top 10 use cases in the scope of Copernicus space infrastructure, 9 potential applied technologies, and 39 available commercial platforms. Additional Earth Observation (EO) infrastructures are proposed to reduce measurements gaps, based on a weighting system that assigned high relevance for measurements associated to Marine for Weather Forecast over Polar Regions. This study concludes with a rank and mapping of the potential technologies and the suitable commercial platforms to cover most of the requirements of the top ten use cases, analyzing the Marine for Weather Forecast, Sea Ice Monitoring, Fishing Pressure, and Agriculture and Forestry: Hydric stress as the priority use cases., Peer Reviewed, Postprint (published version)

Satellite architectures where networked, heterogeneous observation nodes capture data in a distributed manner are seen as feasible solutions to address the needs of next-generation Earth observation services (i.e. higher spatial, spectral and temporal resolutions at viable costs). Nevertheless, the problems that designers face when approaching these systems-of-systems are still eclipsed by the heterogeneity, dimensionality and multi-level complexity of those. In spite of the many underlying technological challenges, how to optimally architect distributed satellite systems, remains an open source of debate. In this context, this paper presents a design-oriented methodology that is aimed at providing high-level design solutions for this type of architectures in generic EO use-cases. In order to find optimal solutions, the methodology detailed in this paper is grounded on an aggregated architectural figure-of-merit that compresses: (a) system-level performance metrics; (b) use-case requirements; (c) development and launch costs; and (d) a set of architectural quality attributes. The latter contributing term models, assesses and weights several of the so-called 'ilities' of an architecture and allows to select designs that exhibit some desired qualities. With a dimensionality of more than five thousand architectural alternatives, the study has been illustrated with a marine weather forecast use-case. Both the exploration of design alternatives and the analysis of the results have shown the benefits of medium and small satellite platforms and have stressed their potential in the design of distributed satellite systems. Finally, this paper concludes by suggesting that this very optimization framework and methodology could also be used for a quantitative gap analysis aiming at deriving the technological road map for future engineering teams., Peer Reviewed, Postprint (published version)

This work is part of “Operational Network of Individual Observation Nodes” (ONION). ONION is an H2020 project devoted to identify solutions and to satisfy emerging needs of the European Earth Observation (EO) market. In this regard, this work presents a review and analysis of the potential payloads and next generation of sensors in order to cover the measurements gaps of the top ten use cases of the European EO infrastructure. For each use case the potential instruments to support stakeholder requirements are identified, pointing out the aspects in which they represent an innovation with respect to existing technological solutions. This identification of instruments is based on existing, operational, under development, and demonstration missions. The capability of the instrument technologies is evaluated according to the trends in the design for small EO satellites (payload mass <; 500 kg). This work concludes with a set the potential instruments to be possibly developed as part of the future European space infrastructure, proposing an integrated set of instruments and measurements to optimize the performances, simplifying the implementation, and reducing the costs., Peer Reviewed, Postprint (published version)

© 2018 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes,creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works., IEEE Access Best Multimedia Award 2018, pel video de 4'50'' que acompanya l'article: sobre el sistema ONION (a Distributed Satellite Systems (DSS) concept formed by a Walker-Delta constellation formed by 8 heavy nodes including a SAR-X and an optical imager, and 8 small nodes including a GNSS-R payload. ONION provides innovative solutions to complement the current and planned Copernicus offer, targeting relevant and large user communities), The space industry is currently witnessing two concurrent trends: the increased modularity and miniaturization of technologies and the deployment of constellations of distributed satellite systems. As a consequence of the first trend, the relevance of small satellites in line with the “cheaper and faster” philosophy is increasing. The second one opens up completely new horizons by enabling the design of architectures aimed at improving the performance, reliability, and efficiency of current and future space missions. The EU H2020 ONION project (“Operational Network of Individual Observation Nodes”) has leveraged on the concept of Fractionated and Federated Satellite Systems (FFSS) to develop and design innovative mission architectures resulting in a competitive advantage for European Earth Observation (EO) systems. Starting from the analysis of emerging needs in the European EO market, the solutions to meet these needs are identified and characterized by exploring FFSS. In analogy with terrestrial networks, these systems envision the distribution of satellite functionalities amongst multiple cooperating spacecrafts (nodes of a network), possibly independent, and flying on different orbits. FFSS are considered by many as the future of spacebased infrastructures, as they offer a pragmatic, progressive, and scalable approach to improve existing and future space missions. This work summarizes the main results of the ONION project and the high-level design of the Marine Weather Forecast mission for polar regions., Peer Reviewed, Award-winning, Postprint (author's final draft)

Earth observation satellite programs are currently facing, for some applications, the need to deliver hourly revisit times, sub-kilometric spatial resolutions and near-real-time data access times. These stringent requirements, combined with the consolidation of small-satellite platforms and novel distributed architecture approaches, are stressing the need to study the design of new, heterogeneous and heavily networked satellite systems that can potentially replace or complement traditional space assets. In this context, this paper presents partial results from ONION, a research project devoted to study distributed satellite systems and their architecting characteristics. A design-oriented framework that allows selecting optimal architectures for a given user needs is presented in this paper. The framework has been used in the study of a strategic use-case and its results are hereby presented. From an initial design space of 5586 unique architectures, the framework has been able to pre-select 28 candidate designs by an exhaustive analysis of their performance and by quantifying their quality attributes. This very exploration of architectures and the characteristics of the solution space, are presented in this paper along with the selected solution and the results of a detailed performance analysis., Postprint (published version)

This work reviews and analyses potentially relevant technologies to ensure that the gaps and stakeholder needs for sea ice products are covered. Each variable related to sea ice that presenting gaps using the European EO infrastructure on the horizon (2020-2030) is revised according the stakeholder requirements, together with the feasibility of deploying available technologies on small satellites. A survey of instruments oriented towards sea ice observations in the past and current is presented. Based on this survey technological capabilities in terms of the spatial resolution, swath, mass, power, and data rate are obtained. In order to identify the technologies, numerical scores are assigned based on instrument capabilities. This works concludes with a set of the technologies compatible with small platforms, with the objective to complement the sea ice data products of Copernicus Services., Peer Reviewed, Postprint (published version)

Peer Reviewed, Postprint (published version)