NSF Award
1212381
This is a short term (less than one-year) effort to develop a software- defined radio ground station (SDRGS) for use by future geospace research and operational CubeSat missions employing high data rate downlinks (i.e., >1 Mbit/sec).The SDRGS will be based on a prototype version that the proposing team has already developed on the NSF Dynamic Ionosphere CubeSat Experiment (DICE) space weather mission. With this effort, the team will: 1) perform a site survey and feasibility of use study for radio frequencies (UHF and S-band) that are relevant for government frequency allocations at two 18-meter dish sites : the Wallops Flight Facility (WFF) and SRI (Santa Clara, CA); 2) develop a real-time SDRGS architecture that has the capability of acquiring data rates >1 Mbit/second at UHF and S-band; and 3) demonstrate the performance of the SDRGS at UHF at both sites via on-orbit communications with DICE. <br/><br/>When completed and tested with DICE, the SDRGS design and source code will be made publicly available and distributed for use by the CubeSat and nano-satellite communities. The resultant SDRGS will not be limited to use at Wallops or SRI; those two sites were simply chosen for this proposed work given their high-gain, 18-meter dishes and the team's familiarity with both sites. The project will promote education and learning in that two graduate students and two undergraduate students from the department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at USU will perform the majority of the code and hardware development and testing.<br/><br/>The Dynamic Ionosphere Cubesat Experiment (DICE) is one of the first NSF Cubesat missions to be selected and flown. The DICE project consists of two CubeSats, weighing less than 2.2 kg each, which were launched into a highly eccentric low Earth orbit on October 28, 2011. Together the DICE CubeSats measure gradients of electric fields and electron densities in the ionosphere. The main science goal of the DICE project is to study the causes of storm enhanced densities (SED), which is a major space weather disturbance and concern.
