Investigation into New Ground Based Communications Service Offerings in Response to SmallSat Trends

Schaire, Scott H ; Altunc, Serhat ; Wong, Yen Fun ; Kegege, Obadiah O ; Bussey, George D ; Murbach, Marcus ; Garon, Howard ; Dasgupta, Yudhajeet ; Gaines, Steve ; McCarty, Edward(ATLAS Space Operations, Traverse City, MI, United States)

关键词: SMALL SATELLITE TECHNOLOGY;    COMMUNICATION;    NEAR EARTH NETWORK;    APERTURES;    LOW EARTH ORBITS;    LUNAR ORBITS;    PHASED ARRAYS;    LAGRANGE COORDINATES;    WALLOPS ISLAND;   

RP-ID  :  GSFC-E-DAA-TN56583

学科分类：工程和技术（综合）

美国|英语

来源: NASA Technical Reports Server

【 摘 要 】

The number of NASA sponsored Small Satellite (SmallSat) missions is expected to continue to grow rapidly in the next decade and beyond. There is a growing trend towards more ambitious SmallSat missions, including formation flying (Constellation, Cluster, Trailing) SmallSats and SmallSats destined for lunar orbit and beyond. This paper will present an overview of new service offerings the NASA Near Earth Network (NEN) is currently investigating and demonstrating. It will describe the benefits that new service offerings such as Multiple Spacecraft Per Aperture (MSPA), Ground-based Phased Array (GBPA) antennas, Ground-based Aperture Arrays, and Ground-based Antenna Arraying could provide to individual or formation flying SmallSats anywhere from low-earth orbit to the Sun-Earth Lagrange point orbits. It will also present potential implementation options for future demonstrations at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) Wallops Flight Facility (WFF) as well as goals and objectives of such demonstrations.