Dynamic Proximity Communication Link Analysis Tool for Orbiting Satellites and Ground Assets on Mars

Krikorian, Y.; Sue, M. K.; Leon, G.V.; Cooper, LA; Do, S.K.; Kumar, Ramesh; Taggart, David A.; Emmons, Debra; Dichmann, Donald; McVey, John P.; Campbell, Eric T.

doi:10.1109/aero.2006.1655855

Cited by 1 publication

(2 citation statements)

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“…After the satellite launched in phase E, the orbit simulation was improved by using actual parameters extracted from the spacecraft TM, including the orbital and attitude parameters of the real Eu:CROPIS mission. There exist several orbit dynamics tools and previous works implemented a custom simulation tool for its specific case. The simulation presented here is performed with System Simulation Tool, which is a commercial‐off‐the‐shelf orbit dynamics analysis toolkit.…”

Section: Problem Descriptionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The manifestation of these variations is equivalent to amplitude and frequency modulation to the carrier signal, and the effects to the telemetry (TM) link must be considered . There were also some other related works to analyze a dynamic link budget, but no one considered a spinning satellite and the resulting effects on the electronics. Part of our evaluation process was the characterization of the antenna far‐field pattern on a radio frequency (RF) mock‐up and the dynamic link budget analysis utilizing the measurement results and the mission‐specific parameters, such as the type of orbit and spacecraft altitude and attitude profiles.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Dynamic link analysis and its in‐orbit verification on a spin‐stabilized satellite mission Eu:CROPIS

Drobczyk

Budroweit

2020

Satell Commun Network

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In this paper, we present the in-orbit verification of a dynamic link budget approach for the communication link of the Eu:CROPIS (Euglena and Combined Regenerative Organic-Food Production in Space) satellite. Because of the high satellite spin rates of up to 30 rpm, the satellite antennas radio frequency beam becomes strongly dynamic, consisting of fast amplitude variations and phase rotations. Both effects degrade the link quality and might lead to an abort of the communication. The paper presents an accurate method of how to simulate these dynamic effects and examines the simulation outputs with real in-orbit measurements. Both results are compared with each other, and deviations are discussed. K E Y W O R D S analysis and verification, communication link emulation, dynamic link budget, in-orbit verification, spinning satellite 1 | INTRODUCTION This paper presents the in-orbit verification of a dynamic link budget approach for the satellite mission Eu:CROPIS (Euglena and CombinedRegenerative Organic-Food Production in Space) and is an extension of the work presented in recent publications. 1,2 Eu:CROPIS is a spinstabilized satellite, which simulates the gravitational fields of the Moon and Mars for biological on-board experiments. 3 For this reason, one key driver of the Eu:CROPIS satellite is the attitude profile to emulate the required gravity forces. This is achieved via spin-stabilization around the zaxis and a maximum rotation of up to 30 rpm. The z-axis is sun-pointing, sun-synchronous orbit. Moreover, a challenging issue with respect to the communication link is the sun pointing of the spacecraft, which does not allow pointing the antennas towards Earth during ground station contacts. This involves attitude-independent and omnidirectional antenna coverage for the communication link. Both of these aspects lead to fastchanging link conditions during communication, inducing amplitude variations and phase rotations depending on the selected antenna type and its position on the spacecraft structure. Thus, a more detailed analysis is required to reproduce and analyze these effects on the spacecraft and ground station electronics, compared with a state-of-the-art static link budget analysis in accordance with the previous study. 4 The theory for the static link budget calculation can be derived from other studies. 5,6 The mathematical background for the rotational effects was already well described in previous works, 7-9 but it has not been fully simulated and verified in-orbit for a real satellite mission in low earth orbit. Our previous works 1,2 included the characterization of the antenna far-field pattern focusing on the interactions with the satellite structure. Those results are extracted to a mission orbit simulation tool and the end-to-end tests on-ground, with respect to the dynamic link variation, mainly induced by the fast rotation of the antennas and their influence to the functionality of the affected electronics. The effects can have direct impact on the binary phase-shift keying demodulation, a...

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Section: Problem Descriptionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%