| Summary: | Satellites orbiting Earth at very low earth orbit (VLEO) provide benefits such as increased resolution
in optical payloads, reduced costs of launch and enhanced use of air-breathing propulsion and
specular materials. However, operating in such conditions poses a unique set of operational challenges
in the form of perturbations from the gas surface interactions between the satellite body and the
environment. With an increasing commercial and military interest in VLEO satellites and market
value year on year, it is a worthwhile investment to investigate and understand the challenges faced by
VLEO satellites. To this end, this project models the drag of different satellite shapes using a test
particle Monte Carlo solver, eventually deriving an optimized satellite shape with a nose. To do so,
software developments to the analysis tools were conducted. Two case studies were conducted using a
general mission analysis tool, an orbit propagation solver by NASA, to quantify the improvements
between the optimized satellite design and a generic cube satellite.
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