Water Quality Monitoring based on Small Satellite Technology

In order to improve the routine of water quality monitoring and reduce the risk of accidental or deliberate contaminations, this paper presents the development of in-situ water quality monitoring and analysis system based on small satellite technology. A space mission design and analysis was performed in this work. The system consists of three segments; space segment including a constellation of nano-satellites, ground segment entailing the ground station and user-segment containing the in-situ water quality sensors. The authors studied the orbit characteristics and the number of nano-satellites required to cover the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) which presents the most water scarce region of the world. Thus, 9 nano-satellites distributed in 5 low earth orbits (600 km) are needed to cover MENA region continuously for about all the day. Data collected by various sensors such as pH and temperature are sent through Software Defined Radio (SDR) module which is responsible for the satellite communication. Keywords—space mission; nanosatellite; SDR; autonomous; on-line water monitoring