PRIMA capabilities for DAVID communication experiment

DAVID (Data and Video Interactive Distribution), in the field of satellite communications, is a new scientific mission that developed in the framework of the ASI (Italian Space Agency) Small Missions for Science and Technology Programme. The mission is based on a Low Earth Orbit (LEO)-satellite that will embark on the ASI platform PRIMA (Italian Multi-application Re-configurable Platform), currently under development at Alenia Spazio (ALS), two scientific telecommunication experiments: DCE (Data Collection Experiment) and RSE (Resource Sharing Experiment). The paper aims at demonstrating that, taking into account the PRIMA technical characteristics, the pointing requirements of DAVID mission could be usefully met by only platform manoeuvres. The paper will report the results of a trade off between two pointing strategies based respectively on the payload antennae manoeuvres needs and the PRIMA platform agility capabilities, exploiting the impacts in term of site access time, access sequence limitation as well as power constraints.