Ionospheric scintillation impact on the performance of communication satellites

Kurzfassung

Satellite-mediated radio communication links are impacted by ionospheric propagation effects. Communication outage can result from a cumulative effect of ionospheric absorption, Faraday rotation of wave polarization components, random fading of signal amplitude, and of the random phase modulation due to scattering on ionospheric irregularities. The latter two effects, referred to as the scintillation phenomena, are highly variable in spatial and temporal domains and also depend on space weather conditions. As we show in Ref. [1], the modeling of ionospheric scintillation can facilitate the planning and the optimization of CubeSat low budget scientific missions. Such LEO CubeSat-type satellites collect and process scientific data and transmit these via radio transceivers to ground stations. For the ground stations in regions with high scintillation activity, the estimates of communication outage correlate with enhanced amplitude scintillation indices. As illustrated exemplary for the low-latitude stations in Brazil we show that the design the parameters of transceiver antennas, such as power characteristics and gains, can be optimized in advance aiming to minimize the risk of scintillation impact. [1] A.A. Ferreira, R. A. Borges, L. R. Reis, C. Borries, D. Vasylyev, “Investigation of ionospheric effects in the planning of the AlfaCrux UHF satellite communication system,” IEEE Access, 10, 14, June 2022, pp. 65744–65759, doi:10.1109/ACCESS.2022.3183152.