Designing and Simulating a CubeSat constellation for Mars Exploration

View Video Presentation: https://doi.org/10.2514/6.2021-0694.vid Space applications helped us monitor our universe environment and connect ourselves with the deep space by streaming data to home. The miniaturization of hardware has extended our capabilities to optimize for diverse space applications. The revolution in the space industry comes with the introduction of CubeSat Constellation as it distributes the benefits of space access to a large number of people by being cost-efficient and far more reliable. The research proposes an interplanetary deep space nanosatellite network which would assist the future of the In-situ Resource Utilization mission for Mars, human colonization for the moon, and other space-related missions. The constellation is meant to explore the seasonal variation in the Polar Regions of the Red Planet for the evidence of organic molecules and symptoms of life since the evidence of perchlorates found in the soil at the polar region discloses many atmospheric activities that were very rare to find elsewhere on the Martian surface. The trajectory and constellation simulation results are represented using GMAT. The simultaneous communication enabling data transmission and reception between the CubeSat constellation and Ground Station composes the interplanetary deep space communication system to transfer the data gathered by the constellation. The research initially introduces the mission outline, following by the CubeSat system engineering, latest innovative technologies & instruments implanted in CubeSats as well as the in-orbit experimental results, and the optimization of an efficient constellation of multi-satellites on Mars are studied and presented.