Design of an Elliptical Orbit for High-Resolution Optical Observation at a Very Low Altitude over the Korean Peninsula

Surveillance and reconnaissance intelligence in the space domain will become increasingly important in future battlefield environments. Moreover, to assimilate the military provocations and trends of hostile countries, imagery intelligence of the highest possible resolution is required. There are many methods for improving the resolution of optical satellites when observing the ground, such as designing satellite optical systems with a larger diameter and lowering the operating altitude. In this paper, we propose a method for improving ground observation resolution by using an optical system for a previously designed low orbit satellite and lowering the operating altitude of the satellite. When the altitude of a satellite is reduced in a circular orbit, a large amount of thrust fuel is required to maintain altitude because the satellite’s altitude can decrease rapidly due to atmospheric drag. However, by using the critical inclination, which can fix the position of the perigee in an elliptical orbit to the observation area, the operating altitude of the satellite can be reduced using less fuel compared to a circular orbit. This method makes it possible to obtain a similar observational resolution of a medium-sized satellite with the same weight and volume as a small satellite. In addition, this method has the advantage of reducing development and launch costs to that of a small-sized satellite. As a result, we designed an elliptical orbit. The perigee of the orbit is 300 km, the apogee is 8,366.52 km, and the critical inclination is 116.56°. This orbit remains at its lowest altitude to the Korean peninsula constantly with much less orbit maintenance fuel compared to the 300 km circular orbit.