Telemetry Reception and Commanding with a Low Cost Ground Station for the Small Satellite BIRD

Abstract

An increasing demand for low-cost ground stations, which can receive images from operational environmental satellites as well as from dedicated small satellites such as BIRD can be observed in the current decade. In the latter case, the motivation of using such low-cost ground stations can reduce the overall project costs or test new technologies. The objectives of the Experimental Ground Station (EGS), which was developed in the frame of the small satellite project BIRD are: - Investigation and demonstration of direct user reception of regional data from earth observing satellites with a "low-cost" ground station, - Analysis of autonomous activity capabilities, including high level image processing and alarm generation, such as new fire detection algorithms, - Experimental tests for mission operations (commanding). The basic idea of the EGS consist in the philosophy to give the user only regional limited data, for which a high performance ground station is not necessary. Thus the data volume to be received can be reduced. Many local authorities, such as agriculture or fire combat departments for example, needs only regional limited data to do a more efficient work in their region. The basic idea of the EGS is therefore, to analyze the capabilities and limits of a low-cost ground station, which outputs only the data, which is needed by the local end-user. The antenna size of such a Station can be small, which is one of the important cost drivers. The low-cost aspect of the system leads to a design, which incorporates the extensive use of existing commercial-of-the-shelf (COTS) hard- and software. A common PC with a Pentium class CPU is used for data reception and processing as well as for commanding. In order to have a compact size and a easy transportable system, most of the baseband hardware is built into the PC. The software for the data reception os not only storing the data on a local disk but also processes and displays the online telemetry. Payload data can be processed with separate tools, which use algorithms developed by DLR. The software for uplink of telecommands allow also to send software files to the satellite, which can be used to update the on-board software or to support the classification algorithm.