Selección de Configuración Estructural Satelitaria con el Criterio de Reducción de Costes

Published in: Engineering for a Smarter Planet: Innovation, ITC, and Computational Tools for Sustainable Development: Proceedings of the 9th Latin American and Caribbean Conference for Engineering and Technology
Date of Conference: August 3-5, 2011
Location of Conference: Medellin, Colombia
Authors: Félix Calvo Narváez
Carlos Rodríguez Monroy
Refereed Paper: #144

Abstract

For a long time, design and construction of satellites has been associated to high costs. The world-wide economic environment has forced us to rethink the criteria by which these spacecrafts have been developed, giving priority to efficiency but combined with a global cost reduction. We present the preliminary design of an earth- observation satellite, whose mission consists essentially in developing a map of the underground of an area where we know that archaeological rests exist. Furthermore, if to the previous mission, we add that the selected area is located in a country with an emerging economy such as China or Mexico, the project is easily justified by their goverments if its cost does not result high.
The size of this article constrains scope of the study to one of its subsystems, so we had chosen the structural subsystem without disabling other possibilities. This phase ends when the previously detailed satellite concept is validated. We used the milestones model to manage the configuration. After modeling with a monocoque structure, we conclude that it can be improved with a semi-monocoque structure, which combines the advantages of weight reduction, and the most important thing, achieves it with the basis objective of reduced costs.