## 5 Ground Stations and Region of Interest
Figure 12: Ground station arrangements in body-fixed frame. Figure 13a provides a propagation of elevation angles from all the ground stations for a satellite for a period of one day. It signifies its role in making the data received appropriately with minimum deviation. Elevation angles remain as a judgmental parameter to address the health of the data received or any anomalies in the process. Figure 13b provides the inclination of a satellite in a constellation, which plays a vital role with respect to the elevation angle of a ground station to achieve the full pass for a complete packet delivery. Small satellites were improvised on this side of the research, but a substantial scope still remains for constellations to maintain their orbital elements in line with elevation angles thoroughly. As shown above, the variation of the orbit inclination with respect to the elevation angle remains under 1 degree. Figure 13c simulates the satellite's position, which also affects the elevation angle of the ground station due to perturbations and other influences over the period of propagation. A thorough consideration to these factors is noted while studying the real-time implementation of the ground stations for other projects. Hence, it becomes a necessity for the constellation-based analyses to include the ground station parameters and study them extensively for overcoming the majority of the communication-affecting factors and accessing data in a fast and simple manner. This also shows that the variation of satellite  
Figure 13: Variation of elevation angles with satellite parameters. position along the 7000 km semi-major axis has a greater impact on the visibility to the aligned ground stations. Except few peaks, the satellite shows great stability even with its compact size and other constraints. Figure 13d shows the altitude variation and also accounts for the effect on the communication with the ground stations. The elevation angles may vary and have lower visibility as the height of the satellite is altered due to perturbations and other unknown factors. The altitude variation remains under 10-12 km, which is reasonable, as a satellite in a constellation should vary under the given operating conditions. Overall, in view of the description given for the scenarios and analysis presented through the figures below, it is observed to keep a continual track of the small satellites. This is for the effective understanding of the operations on orbit and on ground together in a synchronization which will ease the separate and discrete tracking required for the constellation operators for each satellite. Though it is managed autonomously and reported daily, the unknown anomalies and data-less data packet scenarios can be sighted and reported for the researchers to analyze them for avoiding any chances of operation halting at any given instances. More such information is under analyses to make the constellation of size in this paper (48 satellites/8 planes) can be managed and sequenced autonomously seamlessly for simple but effective operation for the period of its designed lifecycle. The simulation results for the same were obtained as below: