Demonstration of the Federated Satellite Systems Concept for Future Earth Observation Satellite Missions

In the last years, the need to access Earth Observation high spatial resolution data with very low latency, ideally in near-real-time, has increased. Distributed Satellite Systems have emerged as an effective and efficient architecture to deal with these tight requirements. One of these systems is the Federated Satellite Systems which explore the benefits of sharing unused and available resources between satellites, such as memory storage or downlink opportunities. This interaction is known as satellite federations. Additional downlink contacts may enable low-latency communications and increase the downlink capacity. Therefore, the deployment of federations would allow satisfying current Earth Observation community demands. This work contributes to establish this promising paradigm by presenting a proof-of-concept of a federated system, called FSS Experiment payload. This payload is boarded into three stratospheric balloons, and it provides them communications means to create federations. The design of the payload, and the flight campaign results are presented in this work. These results demonstrate the feasibility of deploying federations, as well as the benefits of deploying them in future EO missions.