查看文章

A recently introduced large-scale communication-satellite-based radio astronomy system offers several advantages in terms of radio frequency interference, available radio astronomy observation (RAO) bands, bandwidth, and observability. However, a dual-purpose satellite with communication and cosmic radio signal sensing capability incurs a much higher cost than a communication satellite. This problem motivates us to explore hybrid constellations of medium Earth orbit (MEO) satellites consisting of a mixture of single- and dual-purpose satellites to keep the cost low. In particular, we consider six configurations of half dual-purpose MEO (DMEO) satellites where one-half of the satellites are dual purpose and six configurations of quarter DMEO satellites where a quarter of the satellites are dual purpose. Based on the positioning of DMEO satellites on orbital planes, all the considered configurations fall into three …