High Data-Rate Inter-Satellite Link (ISL) For Space-Based Interferometry

Conference paper (2019)

Authors

Visweswaran Karunanithi Electronics - EEMCS
R.T. Rajan Electronics - EEMCS
P.P. Sundaramoorthy Eindhoven University of Technology, Electronics - EEMCS
Maneesh Verma Student
C.J.M. Verhoeven Electronics - EEMCS
M Bentum Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy (ASTRON), Eindhoven University of Technology
E.W. McCune Electronics - EEMCS
Research Group
Electronics (EEMCS) (TU Delft)
Copyright: © 2019 Visweswaran Karunanithi, R.T. Rajan, P.P. Sundaramoorthy, Maneesh Verma, C.J.M. Verhoeven, M Bentum, E.W. McCune
More Info
expand_more

Published Date

27-10-2019

Language

English

Reuse Rights

Other than for strictly personal use, it is not permitted to download, forward or distribute the text or part of it, without the consent of the author(s) and/or copyright holder(s), unless the work is under an open content license such as Creative Commons.

Faculty

Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science

Department

Microelectronics

Research Group

Electronics

Abstract

The inter-satellite link (ISL) in swarm and constellation missions is a key enabler in the autonomy of the mission. OLFAR (Orbiting Low Frequency Array for Radio astronomy) is one such mission where 10 to 50+ nanosatellites are placed in the Lunar orbit and perform astronomical observations from the far-side of the moon. Each of the nanosatellite in the swarm would carry a receiver that performs observations between 0.3 - 30 MHz, which are the least explored frequency bands in radio astronomy, thus attracting a large scientific interest.
Observations in this frequency bands from Earth are highly challenging as the ionosphere is opaque to these frequency bands. Furthermore, RFI (Radio Frequency Interferences) generated on Earth makes it highly challenging to perform astronomical observations below 30MHz band. The impediments faced by Earth-based or near-Earth-based radio astronomy for these frequency bands is the motivation to perform measurements from the far-side of the moon.
The purpose of using a swarm of nanosatellites to perform low frequency observations is to enable the realization of long observation baselines and additionally, the effective aperture of observation increases with the number of satellites. For the swarm of nanosatellites to operate as a single aperture, it is very important to cross-correlate the information collected by each satellite and this is where the ISL becomes very crucial. Apart from exchanging data collected by the payload, other information such as attitude and timing information needs to be exchanged.
This work derived mission level requirements which would be used to define a suitable communication architecture for space-based radio astronomy missions such as OLFAR. The approach chosen for communication system for such a swarm mission will comprise of two types of ISL: High data-rate directional link that will be used to exchange payload date and low data-rate omni-directional link that will be used to exchange attitude, timing information and be used for localization, positioning and ranging of the nanosatellites in the swarm. This work will present link budgets to show the feasibility of the proposed communication architecture and derive the specs to further design the transceivers.