## 4 Materials and Methods for Designing Tether-Deployed Constellations
### Conceptual Design Execution  
Revisiting the SwingSat concept previously mentioned, the previously mentioned orbit design practices can be applied to a small theoretical constellation of 12 member satellites dispersed by a deployer spacecraft. This is just a small-scale example for the purposes of assisting in demonstrating an application of this work, and is not representative of a real constellation being developed. It is also focused solely on the generalized deployment process soon after launch, not later long-duration operations after initial dispersion. In this example, let there be 12 satellites that need to be distributed around a plane at a median altitude of 500 km. This constellation will be allowed to be deployed in a manner like design option #5 described in Figure 16. The tether deployment system will be designed to operate with the maximum \(\Delta V\) imparted onto each deployed satellite being 20 m/s. The deployment speed is a fairly low and easily achievable using a tether deployment system for small satellite constellation deployment. Further details on deployer and tether design will be described in future published material by the authors. This future documentation is currently focused on tether deployment systems for satellites with individual masses of up to 500 kg, and necessary tape tether systems with masses on the order of a few kilograms made from conventional materials such as carbon fiber and spring steel. Executing the maneuvers for satellite dispersion, the deployer will utilize neutral priority distribution optimization as depicted in Figure 27. This will be done by executing 6 symmetrical releases, each of which releasing two payloads at a time, adding up to the 12 total satellites to be deployed. For scheduling these releases, they will alternate priority for evenly spacing out satellites in the prograde and retrograde release orbits. For distribution of the satellites in each release orbit, the objective will be a nominal distribution of \(360^{\circ}/(12/2)\) satellites = \(60^{\circ}\) between each satellite. The releases will be scheduled for an initial symmetrical release, then monitoring a difference in true anomaly \(\Delta\theta\) between the deployer and first prograde-released payload until reaching \(\Delta\theta=60^{\circ}\) to then execute the next release. This would be followed by monitoring \(\Delta\theta\) between the deployer and first retrograde-released payload until reaching \(\Delta\theta=120^{\circ}\) to then execute the next release. This process of alternating focus between the prograde and retrograde orbits for scheduling releases would continue for the full set of payloads to be deployed. A table describing the criteria for each release is shown in Table 1.  
Following these criteria, these releases can be simulated in a software environment. In this simulation, the deployer was inserted into a simple 500 km altitude, \(45^{\circ}\) inclination circular orbit at 1 October 2023 00:00:00 UTC. The software that was used was STK Version 12.5.0 by AGI/Ansys, and idealized impulsive maneuvers were done using the Astrogator plugin. Orbit propagation was done using STK's Earth H