S@tMax—A space-based system enabling mobile IP applications in vehicles

As personal mobility increases, people spend more time in their vehicles. Furthermore, a large segment of today's workforce is part of a growing mobile service industry. This mobile society creates opportunities to increase productivity which do not yet exist. Today's commuting time could be better utilized and mobile business transactions could be more efficiently conducted, by integrating mobile IP wireless services in vehicles. By means of a direct to mobile user Internet access, and total IP services, integrated into automobiles, S@tMax services can empower the mobile business movement therefore improving productivity. This paper presents a commercial system architecture that will deliver an optimized solution for direct to mobile user Internet access, through an integration of a ground based network infrastructure, use of existing communications satellites and the development of a proprietary satellite system. As a result of a detailed systems engineering process, the architectures of the space, ground and infrastructures segments will be presented. Furthermore, the benefits of on-orbit servicing were examined in the S@tMax context. The approach proposed is considered as an important step towards enforcing main roadway IP coverage in the US, for near-continuous communications and services.     

Developing the next phase in NASAs satellite communications program

NASAs early efforts in satellite communications development brought confidence in space technology use for improved telecommunications. New, worldwide satellite communications systems have resulted, and are now on a commercial, self-sustaining operational basis. Since 1973, NASA has conducted hundreds of user experiments and demonstrated newer technology using ATS-1, -3, -6 and CTS. Now, projections show that the commercial demand will continue to increase, soon exceeding the current technology's capacity.As a result, U.S. Space Policy affirmed in 1978 that NASA should embark again on a research and development program for satellite communications with specific, characterized goals. The resulting plan's elements include $\text{30}\text{20}\text{GHz}$ Ka-band technology, extending the current work in advanced multi-beam antennas; a narrowband system and technology study that could lead to mobile and transportable communications developments; and studies of future uses of technology in communications. The program plan and its evolution are described, followed by a report of current progress and future expectations.     

A Canadian system for satellite based advanced personal communications at the Ka-band

A Canadian Government program is currently under way to define, in detail, services and applications, user requirements, end-to-end system architecture and subsystem equipment design requirements for a demonstration on-board-processing (OBP) communications satellite system. The program has reached an advanced stage of definition. The prime directive of the overall mission is to provide demonstration and development of technology and services.

This paper begins by describing the development of our understanding of the true scope of advanced personal communications services and applications; the user expectations and hence terminal characteristics are also reviewed in the context of the competitive environment of other service offerings both existing and planned. In addition, the results of considerations on spacecraft complexity and hence feasibility, caused by the impact of each service option and the requirements for internetworking, are reviewed.     

国外中继卫星对航天器交会对接的测控通信支持

中继卫星系统的天基测控通信是近代航天技术的重大突破,它能够有效地满足航天器交会对接的测控通信需要。文章分析了美国＂跟踪与数据中继卫星系统＂（TDRSS）和欧洲＂阿特米斯＂（ARTEMIS）中继卫星对＂自动转移飞行器＂（ATV）与＂国际空间站＂（ISS）交会对接任务的测控通信支持,总结了国外中继卫星系统支持航天器交会对接...     

The Western Union Telegraph Company's satellite switched TDMA advanced westar system

The Advanced Westar satellite system now being planned and developed by the Western Union Telegraph Company will replace the presently operating Westar I and Westar II satellites. The Advanced Westar space segment and ground station configuration are described.     

基于APP的卫星地面遥控系统安全性设计

目前,我国绝大部分卫星的遥控指令上行操作必须在专用测控网内进行,当卫星发生在轨异常时,相关支持人员必须赶赴测控中心现场进行集中处置,非工作时段时效性较低,不利于紧急情况下的异常快速处置.对基于APP的卫星地面遥控系统安全应用方案进行了研究和设计,旨在为我国未来卫星高效运行管理提供一种新的手段,通过原型系统的仿真测试,验...     

面向微纳卫星应用的激光数传技术

针对遥感微纳卫星对地高速数传需求,开展面向微纳卫星的激光数传技术研究,突破微纳卫星激光通信终端星地快速捕获建链和协同高精度稳定跟踪、天基终端轻小型化、复合光电组件等关键技术。完成微纳卫星的天基激光终端和地面激光终端研制,并开展星地传输试验验证,实现 1 230 km、10/50/100 Mbps 的星地数据传输,验证了相关技术,为后续我国微纳卫星对地遥感应用提供了理想的星地数传手段。     

RF communications subsystem for the Radiation Belt Storm Probes mission

The NASA Radiation Belt Storm Probes (RBSP) mission, currently in Phase B, is a two-spacecraft, Earth-orbiting mission, which will launch in 2012. The spacecraft's S-band radio frequency (RF) telecommunications subsystem has three primary functions: provide spacecraft command capability, provide spacecraft telemetry and science data return, and provide accurate Doppler data for navigation. The primary communications link to the ground is via the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory's (JHU/APL) 18 m dish, with secondary links to the NASA 13 m Ground Network and the Tracking and Data Relay Spacecraft System (TDRSS) in single-access mode. The on-board RF subsystem features the APL-built coherent transceiver and in-house builds of a solid-state power amplifier and conical bifilar helix broad-beam antennas. The coherent transceiver provides coherency digitally, and controls the downlink data rate and encoding within its field-programmable gate array (FPGA). The transceiver also provides a critical command decoder (CCD) function, which is used to protect against box-level upsets in the C&DH subsystem. Because RBSP is a spin-stabilized mission, the antennas must be symmetric about the spin axis. Two broad-beam antennas point along both ends of the spin axis, providing communication coverage from boresight to 70°. An RF splitter excites both antennas; therefore, the mission is designed such that no communications are required close to 90° from the spin axis due to the interferometer effect from the two antennas. To maximize the total downlink volume from the spacecraft, the CCSDS File Delivery Protocol (CFDP) has been baselined for the RBSP mission. During real-time ground contacts with the APL ground station, downlinked files are checked for errors. Handshaking between flight and ground CFDP software results in requests to retransmit only the file fragments lost due to dropouts. This allows minimization of RF link margins, thereby maximizing data rate and thus data volume.     

Satellite-aided land mobile radio experiments,applications and problems

Radio communications between vehicles or individuals and base stations are essential to many public safety, law enforcement and commercial users in urban areas. Present day communications are limited to nearly line-of-sight distances from the vehicle or hand portable units to a base station or repeater. It is probable that many potential users in rural, remote and offshore areas would benefit if the communications were available everywhere on land and territorial waters. Geosynchronous satellites can serve as repeaters for mobile and personal radios, and they appear to be a cost effective means of providing the service.Voice bandwidth communication and automatic position monitoring of an automobile were tested using the VHF transponders of NASAs ATS-3 and ATS-1 satellites. Voice communications were reliable and position fixes were accurate to one fourth mile, with 0.3 mile precision of individual fixes.Demonstrations for potential users have included emergency medical voice and telemetry communications between ambulances and hospitals.While technical feasibility of satellite-aided mobile and personal communications has been demonstrated, and its potential value is appreciated by a small segment of the user community, many problems remain before an operational system could be implemented. Solutions to the problems require an experimental satellite with a multibeam antenna. The satellite or its associated ground terminals should incorporate computer controlled network switching to test demand assignment of channels. Prolonged experience by many users of the experimental satellite in their routine operations would aggregate user needs and define the capital investment that would be justified to implement a commercial operating system.     

Communications satellite business ventures : Measuring the impact of technology programmes and related policies

Both commercial organizations and government agencies invest in spacecraft technology programmes aimed at increasing the performance of communications satellites. Government agencies also make policy decisions which may affect communications satellite business ventures. This article describes an economic evaluation and planning tool which has been developed to assess the impact of various policies on typical fixed satellite service business ventures. The methodology is based upon a stochastic financial simulation model (DOMSAT II) which allows for consideration of reliability and various market, performance and cost uncertainties. Results of the assessment of NASA on-orbit and space power technology programmes are presented, as are results of insurance v self insurance decisions and the choice of transportation system.     

The origin of the smaller, faster, cheaper approach in NASA’s solar system exploration program

The current emphasis on smaller, faster, cheaper (SFC) spacecraft in NASA’s solar system exploration program is the product of a number of interacting – even interdependent – factors. The SFC concept as applied to NASA’s solar system exploration program can be viewed as the vector sum of (1) the space science community’s desire for more frequent planetary missions to plug the data gaps, educate the next generation of scientists, provide missions to targets of opportunity, and enable programmatic flexibility in times of budgetary crisis; (2) the poor publicity garnered by NASA in the early 1990s and the resultant atmosphere of public criticism (creating an opportunity for reform); (3) The Strategic Defense Initiative Organization’s and the National Space Council community’s desire to advance the Space Exploration Initiative and their perception that the NASA culture at the time represented a barrier to the effective pursuit of space exploration; (4) the effective leadership of NASA Administrator Daniel Goldin; and (5) the diminishing budget profile for space sciences in the early 1990s. This paper provides a summary of the origin of the smaller, faster, cheaper approach in the planetary program. A more through understanding of the history behind this policy will enable analysts to assess more accurately the relative successes and failures of NASA’s new approach to solar system exploration.     

Bi-directional multimedia satellite communication system using ultrasmall user terminals

NTT started development of a multimedia satellite communication system to provide a medium for Internet access in 1995. This system, which entered commercial service in 1998, uses a hybrid network consisting of a high-speed satellite forward link and terrestrial access links. To meet the increasing demand for low-cost and ubiquitous access links, a second-generation system equipped with satellite transmitting functions is now being developed. The user terminal design calls for a DTH-sized receiver antenna and a transmission power of less than 0.1 W, which will make it suitable for use in homes and small offices. The access link signals from the user terminals are superimposed onto the high-speed TDM forward link signal for efficient use of the frequency band. The transmission power from the user terminal is significantly low compared to that of the forward link signal, a novel interference cancellation technique is introduced. A channel assignment scheme called “channel reservation with rapid release” is introduced for both efficient use of the channels and higher transmission throughput. The forward link signal is completely compatible with the first-generation system, and the data rate is about 30 Mb/s.The paper describes the system's configuration, the central earth station's configuration, and the key technologies of the radio system and access control system.     

PFI in the sky, or pie in the sky? — Privatising military space

The UK has made use of dedicated, national military satellites for communications since November 1969. The replacement of the current system, Skynet 4, which will reach the end of its design lifetime early in the next century, is currently under consideration. Possible options which have been mooted to date include a new generation of a national satellite system (Skynet 5), or one of several international collaborative projects. However, these appear to have been superseded by a new possibility — a privately, commercially funded national system under the government's Private Finance Initiative (PFI). This paper examines the historical reliance of the UK on military satellite communications, the options for the next generation of such systems, and, drawing on the UK example, raises a number of questions concerning the potential significance of reliance on commercial enterprise to provide a key element of defence capability.     

SSETO—Small Satellite for Exoplanetary Transit Observation

SSETO is the result of a phase-A study in context of the small satellite program of the University of Stuttgart that demonstrates the capability of a university institute to build a small satellite with a budget of 5 million Euro. The satellite will be capable of observing exoplanets in a Neptune–Earth scale and obtaining data of interstellar dust. Due to a system failure of NASA?s Kepler mission, there is currently (October 2013) a lack of satellites searching for exoplanets. This paper details the design of subsystems and payload, as well as the required test tasks in accordance with the mission profile at a conceptional level. The costs for standard spacecraft testing and integration tasks are included, but not those of launch, ground support, operations and engineer working hours.     

The critical satellite technical issues of future pervasive broadband low-cost communication networks

Using a baseline design for a 30/20 GHz system, this paper addresses the critical technical issues of signal waveform design, projected spacecraft technology, satellite launch options and satellite cost. With DPCM (differential pulse-coded modulation) video signal encoding, 32 Mb/s user-to-user data rate per channel, 10% overhead, two orthogonal polarizations, and crosstalk loss limited to 1 dB, TFM (tamed frequency modulation—a type of QPSK) permits about 75 channels/GHz of frequency allocation, i.e. about twice the capacity possible with MSK or SFSK (types of QPSK). The BOM (beginning of mission) weight and power of a baseline 400-channel multi-beam satellite is about 1800 kg and 5000 W. Each 35 Mb/s channel can support 1–10 video channels depending on the signal processing at the ground terminals. These weight and power estimates assume hardened digital logic, composite material for a multibeam antenna structure, high-efficiency solar cells (45 W/kg), NiH₂ batteries and 10W/20 GHz power amplifiers. If more speculative late-1980s solar cell technology is assumed, then the BOM weight decreases about 10–15%. Using the Space Transportation System being developed by NASA, geosynchronous deployment options are shown as a function of communications capacity. Based on a cost model for large communication satellites, the total space segment cost of two active satellites and one spare would be about $485M. This system would have a peak capacity of 14 Gb/s or 400-35 Mb/s simultaneous one-way channels. Demonstration and/or initial system (ground plus space) costs would be significantly less. It is concluded that the above baseline satellite appears to be technically feasible in the late-1980s.     

Cost-driven design of small satellite remote sensing systems*

Earth remote sensing (alongside communications) is one of the key application of Earth-orbiting satellites. Civilian satellites in the LANDSAT and SPOT series provide Earth images which have been used for a vast spectrum of applications in agriculture, meteorology, hydrology, urban planning and geology, to name but a few. In the defence sector, satellite remote sensing systems are a critical tool in strategic and tactical planning – for the countries which can afford them. To date, remote sensing satellites have fallen into one of these two categories: military missions driven by the requirement for very high resolution and orbital agility; and multipurpose civil satellites using general purpose sensors to serve a diverse community of end users. For military-style missions, the drive to high resolution sets the requirements for optics, attitude control and downlink data bandwidth. For civil missions, the requirement to satisfy multiple, diverse user applications forces compromises on spectral band and orbit selection. Although there are exceptions, many small satellite remote sensing missions carry on in this tradition, concentrating on ultra high resolution products for multiple user communities. This results in satellites costing on the order of US $100 M, not optimised for any particular application. This paper explores an alternative path to satellite remote sensing, aiming simultaneously to reduce cost and to optimise imaging products for specific applications. By decreasing the cost of the remote sensing satellite system to a critical point, it becomes appropriate to optimise the sensor's spectral and temporal characteristics to fit the requirements of a small, specialised user base. The critical engineering trade-off faced in a cost driven mission is how to reduce mission cost while still delivering a useful product to the selected user. At the Surrey Space Centre, we have pursued an engineering path using two dimensional CCD array sensors, commercial off-the-shelf lenses and gravity-gradient stabilised microsatellites. In spite of the inherent limitations of such systems, recent successes with the Thai Microsatellite Company's Thai-Phutt satellite show that a system costing in the region of US $3 million, can approach the spectral and spatial characteristics of LANDSAT. Surrey's UoSAT-12 minisatellite (to be launched April, 1999) will further develop this cost-driven approach to provide 10 m panchromatic resolution and 30 m multi-spectral resolution. This paper describes the Thai-Phutt and UoSAT-12 imaging systems, explaining the engineering methods and trade-offs. Although Surrey is presently the only centre presently pursuing such implementations, our paper shows that they deserve wider consideration.     

我国天基综合信息网构想

阐述了天基综合信息网的定义、组成和特征;介绍了美国和欧洲天基综合信息网的研究情况;提出了我国天基综合信息网的体系架构,其中包含通信卫星、导航卫星、遥感卫星、载人飞船等航天器和临近空间各种飞行器,以及地面系统。分析了该网络的特点和可用的网络协议结构;探讨了该网络的组网结构、网络协议、服务质量(QoS)路由、网络管理、网络安全防护、激光通信和星载处理交换等多项关键技术。依据国情,提出了我国天基综合信息网构想。此构想采用双层(地球静止轨道和低地球轨道)通信卫星星座和导航卫星星座,实现全球全时覆盖空间层航天器、临近空间层飞行器和地面层各种用户终端,通过星间链路、星地链路和地面线路组成一个空天地一体化的全球信息网络。在国外不设地球站的情况下,该网络可实现:国内测控站测控我国全球运行的卫星;国内遥感站实时接收我国全球遥感卫星发送的信息;国内关口站管理我国授权的全球用户站之间的互通信息。最后,提出了开展我国天基综合信息网的可行性研究建议。     

NASA''s small spacecraft technology initiative “Clark” spacecraft

The Small Satellite Technology Initiative (SSTI) is a National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) program to demonstrate smaller, high technology satellites constructed rapidly and less expensively. Under SSTI, NASA funded the development of “Clark,” a high technology demonstration satellite to provide 3-m resolution panchromatic and 15-m resolution multispectral images, as well as collect atmospheric constituent and cosmic x-ray data. The 690-Ib. satellite, to be launched in early 1997, will be in a 476 km, circular, sun-synchronous polar orbit. This paper describes the program objectives, the technical characteristics of the sensors and satellite, image processing, archiving and distribution. Data archiving and distribution will be performed by NASA Stennis Space Center and by the EROS Data Center, Sioux Falls, South Dakota, USA.     

The development of a Russian communication satellite of small class, operating in the geostationary and high-elliptical orbits

In 1994–1995 Lavochkin Association (Russia) together with the other enterprises in accordance with technical requirements of the Russian Space agency, developed a new Russian communication satellite of a small class that will operate in both the geostationary (GSO) and high-elliptical (HEO) orbits. This satellite may be injected into operational orbits using a SOYUZ-2 launch vehicle (LV) and a FREGAT upper stage (US) from Plesetsk and Baykonur space launch sites (SLS).The main reason for creating such a satellite was to decrease the cost of the support and development of the Russian communication geostationary satellites group.Russian satellites Horizont, Express, Ekran and Gals, which operate in GSO, are the basis of the space segment for communications, radio and TV broadcasting. All of these satellites are injected into GSO by the PROTON LV. PROTON is a launch vehicle of a heavy class. The use of a middle class LV instead of a heavy class will allow to reduce considerably the launch cost. The change of a heavy class LV to a LV of middle class determined one economic reason for this project. Besides, the opportunity to launch S/C into GSO from Russian Plesetsk SLS increases the independence of Russia in the domain of space communications, despite the presence of the contract with Kazachstan about the rent of Baykonur SLS. Finally, use of small satellites with a rather small number of transponders is more effective than the use of big satellites. It will allow also to increase a satellite group (by the launch of additional satellites) precisely in accordance to the development of the ground segment.