Big Data Analysis of the Relevance of Shape and Function of Global Geostationary Satellites

There are already more than 500 active satellites in geostationary orbit at present with different shapes and functions. However, few people have studied the shape of global active Geostationary Satellites, whether their shapes can be classified, and relevance between their shapes and functions because of a large number of Geostationary Satellites. In this paper, we conduct a large data analysis of the shape and function of satellites that were still active in GEO orbit as of November 7, 2017 based on Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) satellite database and some web sites. Then, we propose a classification based on the number of solar wings of a satellite, through which active geostationary satellites are divided into four categories. Under this classification, we have analyzed the relevance of shapes and functions of Geostationary Satellites.