Formulation and Characterization of One-Way Radiometric Tracking with the Iris Radio Using a Chip-Scale Atomic Clock

Abstract

The Iris radio is a National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Deep Space Network (DSN)-compatible software-defined radio designed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and built by the Space Dynamics Laboratory (SDL). Because of Iris's small size and mass (0.5 L and 1.1 kg), it is ideal for small satellite or even CubeSat applications (Kobayashi et al., 2019). It has proven its utility for deep space missions, notably in the 2018 NASA MarCO mission, which flew a pair of CubeSats by Mars and provided real-time communications during NASA's InSight landing using the Iris transponders (Klesh et al., 2018). Since then, the Iris radio has had numerous improvements, including the addition of regenerative ranging (Angkasa et al., 2019), which is primarily used to improve the performance of two-way pseudonoise (PN) ranging. These improvements have also made possible the addition of one-way range measurable on the uplink with only modest modifications to the Iris firmware. Recently, NASA's CAPSTONE mission, launched on June 28, 2022 and currently near the Moon in a near-rectilinear halo orbit (NRHO), will perform navigation tests, including the use of one-way range and range rate for navigation (Thompson et al., 2022). In support of this, the Iris