Space power by ground-based laser illumination

Reducing energy storage requirements of space power systems by illuminating the photovoltaic arrays with a remotely located laser system is addressed. It is proposed that large lasers be located on cloud-free sites at one or more ground locations and that large lenses or mirrors with adaptive optical correction be used to reduce the beam spread due to diffraction or atmospheric turbulence. During the eclipse periods or lunar night, the lasers illuminate the solar arrays to a level sufficient to provide operating power. Two applications are discussed: illumination of geosynchronous orbit satellites and illumination of a moonbase power system. Issues for photovoltaic receivers for such a system are discussed     

A high-capacity aeronautical mobile satellite system

A conceptual system design is described for a satellite-based aeronautical safety communications system capable of serving both general aviation (GA) aircraft and commercial aviation (CA) aircraft in the contiguous US (CONUS) in the mid-1990s. It is shown how the large system capacity that is required can be obtained using a 15-m deployable antenna onboard a high-power commercial communications satellite expected to be available in the mid-1990s     

Improving GPS-Based Landing System Performance using an Empirical Barometric Altimeter Confidence Bound

This paper develops an empirical confidence bound for barometric altimeter altitude errors and shows how this bound may improve the performance of GPS-based approach and landing systems. This empirical bound is developed using historical meteorological data collected at a set of geographically diverse locations over a thirty year period. The confidence bound developed is shown to provide a Gaussian overbound on altimeter altitude errors in standard atmospheric conditions between a 10-5 and 10-6 confidence level. This confidence bound is integrated into the standard methodology for analyzing the performance of GPS-based landing systems and the results of a performance trade study using the confidence bound are presented. The results show that incorporating the empirical barometric altimeter confidence bound provides an increase in the coterminous United States (CONUS) service volume for lateral precision with vertical guidance (LPV) type approaches. While this increase is approximately 2% for an L1 single-frequency GPS user, it jumps to roughly 40% for an L5 single-frequency user.     

Scan Beam Antenna Intermodulation Improvement Due to Spatial Dispersion

In the recent development of scan beams for application tomobile satellite or thin route communication systems, theintermodulation (IM) generated by the element amplifiers isspatially dispersed, such that some of the IM radiated energy failsoutside the intended beam area. In addition, some of the IM fallinginside the beam area have frequencies different from the carriersintended for that area.It is shown that for systems with frequency reuse, an average IM noise reduction of several dB can he realized. The improvementin carrier-to-IM noise ratio can be used to increase system capacity,or for given capacity it can be used to reduce RF power amplifierbackoff, which can be translated into a reduction of spacecraftprime power requirement.     

星载多波束天线设计

给出了星载多波束天线的设计方法、步骤和参数选择原则,给出了2个区域多点波束天线和赋形波束的设计实例,并用物理光学法计算了覆盖区域的天线方向图、覆盖区增益和频率复用时的同极化波束隔离。     

A satellite interference location system using differential timeand phase measurement techniques

The design and development of a system for inferring the position of terrestrial satellite uplink stations using existing domestic satellites with minimal disruption to normal satellite operation are described. Two methods are presented by which a quantity measured at a terrestrial receiving site is mapped into a curve of possible uplink locations on the Earth's surface. One method involves measuring differential time delays of a single uplink signal observed through two adjacent spacecraft. The other uses a short baseline interferometer composed of the two cross-polarized and spatially separated antenna feeds aboard an affected satellite. A unique location is obtained by using an appropriate combination of the two methods. A system for measurement of the required differential delays and phases and experimental work performed to demonstrate the feasibility of the location methods are described     

Independent Ground Monitor Coverage of GPS Satellites

The Federal Aviation Administration plans to independently monitor signals in space from the Global Positioning System (GPS) for the purpose of providing immediate awareness to civil aviation users of the operational status of GPS when it is used in the National Airspace System. The operational status will be disseminated to Air Traffic Control and will possibly be broadcast from ground monitoring stations to GPS aviation users via a dedicated integrity channel. An algorithm is described that measures the coverage of a configuration of ground monitoring station locations, and is applied to several different configurations of ground monitoring stations to compare the coverage provided. Also included are the resulting ground monitoring station configurations that give the best coverage of GPS signals for several specific geographical areas, the conterminous United States (CONUS), Canada, and Alaska.     

Nontracking antenna performance for inertially controlled spacecraft using TDRSS

A series of tests to validate an antenna pointing concept for spin-stabilized satellites using a data relay satellite is described. These tests show that proper antenna pointing on an inertially stabilized spacecraft can lead to significant access time through the relay satellite even without active antenna pointing. We summarize the test results, the simulations to model the effects of antenna pattern and space loss, and the expected contact times. We also show how antenna beam width affects the results.     

一种卫星导航接收机固定多波束抗干扰方法

自适应波束形成抗干扰性能受先验信息、通道幅相误差等因素影响较大,在工程应用中实现复杂,鲁棒性较差。针对这一问题,提出了一种卫星导航接收机固定多波束抗干扰方法,该方法将信号空间分为多个子空间,通过最优分配策略选取多个子空间分别实现固定波束指向,并相应地在每个波束后配置独立的卫星捕获跟踪通道组,然后依据最高信噪比准则在所有的子空间中优选卫星进行定位解算。该方法无需先验信息辅助,在抑制干扰信号的同时对卫星信号形成接收增益,在存在工程误差的实际条件下可达到与典型自适应波束形成算法相当的抗干扰性能,且具有鲁棒性强、更易工程实现等优点。最后,通过计算机仿真验证了该方法的有效性。     

Mid-Continent LORAN-C Expansion

The Coast Guard is extending the Continental United States (CONUS) LORAN-C coverage as part of the Federal Aviation Administration project to incorporate LORAN-C into the National Airspace System. The increased coverage will expand the number of airports approved for LORAN-C non-precision instrument approaches and enable direct Instrumental Flight Rules (IFR) routing by suitably equipped aircraft in and through the mid-continent region of the United States. The project will involve construction of a new LORAN-C chain which will be linked to the existing CONUS chains. In addition to the aviation benefits, the Mid-Continent LORAN-C Expansion will broaden the availability of LORAN-C positioning to a growing number of terrestrial users such as resource management, emergency response and fleet management.     

Bandwidth maximization for satellite laser communication

Free space optical communication between satellites networked together can make possible high speed communication between different places on Earth. The basic free space optical communication network includes at least two satellites. In order to communicate between them, the transmitter satellite must track the beacon of the receiver satellite and point the information optical beam in its direction. The pointing systems for laser satellite communication suffer during tracking from vibration due to electronic noise, background radiation from interstellar objects such as Sun, Moon, Earth, and Stars in the tracking field of view, and mechanical impact from satellite internal and external sources. Due to vibrations the receiver receives less power. This effect limits the system bandwidth for given bit error rate (BER). In this research we derive an algorithm to maximize the communication system bandwidth using the transmitter telescope gain as a free variable based on the vibration statistics model and the system parameters. Our model makes it possible to adapt the bandwidth and transmitter gain to change of vibration amplitude. We also present an example of a practical satellite network which includes a direct detection receiver with an optical amplifier. A bandwidth improvement of three orders of magnitude is achieved in this example for certain conditions, as compared with an unoptimized system     

Optimum transmitter optics aperture for satellite opticalcommunication

An important aspect in satellite optical communication is to obtain minimum bit error rate (BER) using minimum power. This aim can be achieved with very small transmitter beam divergence angles. The disadvantages of too narrow divergence angle is that the transmitter beam may sometimes miss the receiver satellite, due to pointing vibrations. A mathematical model of communication and tracking systems that optimize the BER as function of the transmitter gain is derived     

Performance evaluation of digital beamforming strategies for satellite communications

Smart antennas are becoming one of the promising technologies to meet the rapidly increasing demands for more capacity of satellite communication systems. A main component in a smart antenna system is beamforming. Because of the limitations of analog beamforming, digital beamforming will be employed in future satellite communication systems. We evaluate the performance of various digital beamforming strategies proposed in the literature for satellite communications: 1) single fixed beam/single user, 2) single fixed beam/multiple users, 3) single adaptive beam/single user, and 4) single Chebyshev dynamic beam/multiple users. Multiple criteria including coverage, system capacity, signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR), and computation complexity are used to evaluate these satellite communication beamforming strategies. In particular, a Ka-band satellite communication system is used to address the various issues of these beamforming strategies. For the adaptive beamforming approach, subarray structure is used to obtain the weights of a large 2D antenna array, and a globally convergent recurrent neural network (RNN) is proposed to realize the adaptive beamforming algorithm in parallel. The new subarray-based neural beamforming algorithm can reduce the computation complexity greatly, and is more effective than the conventional least mean square (LMS) beamforming approach. It is shown that the single adaptive beam/single user approach has the highest system capacity.     

离子推力器羽流场模拟以及Mo+CEX沉积分析

离子推力器工作产生的羽流会对航天器产生影响,严重时甚至会造成航天器无法正常工作,为了精确评估离子推力器羽流特性及其对航天器的作用,采用基于粒子轨道理论(PIC,Particle-In-Cell)的模型对复杂的航天器的离子推力器羽流进行了数值模拟,并结合最近几年发展起来的浸入式有限元(IFE,Immersed Finite Ele-ment),采用结构网格准确计算复杂边界电场。通过模拟,获得了Mo+CEX离子在卫星表面的最大可能沉积分布,定量分析了卫星表面Mo+CEX离子的最大可能沉积率,表明在垂直于推力器主束流方向的卫星组件的表面上容易产生较大的Mo+CEX离子污染沉积率,而平行于推力器主束流方向上Mo+CEX离子污染沉积率相对较小。     

三轴稳定式卫星的热特性研究

热特性研究是卫星热控制系统、红外辐射特性研究、红外隐身设计的基础和重要组成部分。建立卫星运行轨道计算模型,获得不同时刻卫星三维坐标及轨道高度。根据太阳、卫星、地球三者位置关系,建立三轴稳定式卫星空间热流计算模型。综合考虑空间热流、向外辐射、内部热载荷等因素,对卫星进行传热分析计算,获得各时刻卫星各面温度分布。分析了太阳吸收系数和卫星内部热载荷对表面温度分布的影响。研究结果表明:卫星在地球阴影区各面温度明显降低;除了散热面,太阳吸收系数对卫星表面温度影响显著;可以根据散热面大致地判断卫星运行状况。     

A Domestic Satellite Design

This paper deals with the design parameters of a communications satellite which would be capable of providing domestic telephony, data, and television distribution services. Certain important aspects of the design are discussed, including satellite antenna beam coverage, transponder bandwidth, and transponder radiated power for a given weight range. A baseline satellite design is then presented which has 24 transponders (with 4000 watts radiated power on-axis and 34-MHz radio-frequency bandwidth) fully accessible from the 48 contiguous United States. The design uses crossed linear polarization to reuse the satellite transmit and receive frequency spectrum.     

30/20 GHz Band Small Earth Station for ISSDN Experiment

The system design and operational results of a 30/20 GHz band small Earth station for integrated services satellite digital network (ISSDN) experiments are presented. The Earth station has a high efficiency offset Cassegrain antenna with elliptical beam, a high power klystron amplifier with 1 kW output power and an uncooled parametric low noise amplifier with 200 K noise temperature. Experiments were performed using the medium capacity communications satellite for experimental purposes (CS). Performance on the Earth station was high. Effective radiation power (ERP) was greater than 88.1 dBW, and the receiving figure of merit (G/T) was larger than 30.6 dB/K. Good transmission characteristics were obtained through the satellite link for demand assigned time-division multiple access (DA-TDMA) with 20 Mbit/s bit rate.     

Experiments on aeronautical satellite communications using ETS-Vsatellite

The world's first aeronautical satellite communication experiments, conducted at L-band frequencies using a commercial aircraft, are described. An airborne antenna with electronically steerable beam and communication equipment was installed in a B-747F freighter flying over transoceanic flight routes. The satellite used in these experiments is the Engineering Test Satellite-Five (ETS-V). During the test period, various experiments, such as antenna pattern measurements, transmission performances, and voice quality evaluation were conducted. As the airborne antenna is the key component for the aeronautical satellite communication system, emphasis has been placed on antenna characteristics. Its performance is found to be closely related to the fading characteristics in low-elevation areas and to transmission error performance