Pub Date : 2012-03-03DOI: 10.1109/AERO.2012.6187134
T. Wypych, R. Angelo, F. Kuester
We present a functional implementation of a lightweight GSM (Global System for Mobile Communications) cellular base station and core network based on open-source software, coupled with a simple and rapidly deployable autonomous aerial vehicle for establishing field communications in the absence of commercial service. We advocate the utility of mobile GSM cellular devices for communication and data acquisition in many types of fieldwork, posing advantages in functionality over conventional long-range push-to-talk radios and advantages in size over laptop type data terminals. We argue that alternative radio communications technologies inevitably fail to simultaneously optimize cost, power management, range, integration, and spectral efficiency compared to the GSM radio interface.
{"title":"AirGSM: An unmanned, flying GSM cellular base station for flexible field communications","authors":"T. Wypych, R. Angelo, F. Kuester","doi":"10.1109/AERO.2012.6187134","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/AERO.2012.6187134","url":null,"abstract":"We present a functional implementation of a lightweight GSM (Global System for Mobile Communications) cellular base station and core network based on open-source software, coupled with a simple and rapidly deployable autonomous aerial vehicle for establishing field communications in the absence of commercial service. We advocate the utility of mobile GSM cellular devices for communication and data acquisition in many types of fieldwork, posing advantages in functionality over conventional long-range push-to-talk radios and advantages in size over laptop type data terminals. We argue that alternative radio communications technologies inevitably fail to simultaneously optimize cost, power management, range, integration, and spectral efficiency compared to the GSM radio interface.","PeriodicalId":6421,"journal":{"name":"2012 IEEE Aerospace Conference","volume":"51 1","pages":"1-9"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2012-03-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"72799948","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2012-03-03DOI: 10.1109/AERO.2012.6187020
K. Kirby, S. Bushman, M. Butler, R. Conde, K. Fretz, C. Herrmann, A. Hill, R. Maurer, R. Nichols, G. Ottman, M. Reid, G. Rogers, D. Srinivasan, J. Troll, B. Williams
NASA's Radiation Belt Storm Probe (RBSP) is an Earth-orbiting mission scheduled to launch in September 2012 and is the next science mission in NASA's Living with a Star Program. The RBSP mission will investigate, characterize and understand the physical dynamics of the radiation belts, and the influence of the sun on the earth's environment, by measuring particles, electric and magnetic fields and waves that comprise the geospace. The mission is composed of two identically instrumented spinning spacecraft in an elliptical orbit around earth from 600 km perigee to 30,000 km apogee at 10 degree inclination to provide full sampling of the Van Allen radiation belts. The twin spacecraft will follow slightly different orbits and will lap each other 4 times per year; this offers simultaneous measurements over a range of spacecraft separation distances. A description of the spacecraft environment is provided along with spacecraft and subsystem key characteristics and accommodations that protect sensitive spacecraft electronics and support operations in the harsh radiation belt environment.
{"title":"Radiation Belt Storm Probe spacecraft and impact of environment on spacecraft design","authors":"K. Kirby, S. Bushman, M. Butler, R. Conde, K. Fretz, C. Herrmann, A. Hill, R. Maurer, R. Nichols, G. Ottman, M. Reid, G. Rogers, D. Srinivasan, J. Troll, B. Williams","doi":"10.1109/AERO.2012.6187020","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/AERO.2012.6187020","url":null,"abstract":"NASA's Radiation Belt Storm Probe (RBSP) is an Earth-orbiting mission scheduled to launch in September 2012 and is the next science mission in NASA's Living with a Star Program. The RBSP mission will investigate, characterize and understand the physical dynamics of the radiation belts, and the influence of the sun on the earth's environment, by measuring particles, electric and magnetic fields and waves that comprise the geospace. The mission is composed of two identically instrumented spinning spacecraft in an elliptical orbit around earth from 600 km perigee to 30,000 km apogee at 10 degree inclination to provide full sampling of the Van Allen radiation belts. The twin spacecraft will follow slightly different orbits and will lap each other 4 times per year; this offers simultaneous measurements over a range of spacecraft separation distances. A description of the spacecraft environment is provided along with spacecraft and subsystem key characteristics and accommodations that protect sensitive spacecraft electronics and support operations in the harsh radiation belt environment.","PeriodicalId":6421,"journal":{"name":"2012 IEEE Aerospace Conference","volume":"11 1","pages":"1-20"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2012-03-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"73431195","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2012-03-03DOI: 10.1109/AERO.2012.6187041
T. Howard, A. Morfopoulos, J. Morrison, Y. Kuwata, C. Villalpando, L. Matthies, M. McHenry
Safe navigation under resource constraints is a key concern for autonomous planetary rovers operating on extraterrestrial bodies. Computational power in such applications is typically constrained by the radiation hardness and energy consumption requirements. For example, even though the microprocessors used for the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) mission rover are an order of magnitude more powerful than those used for the rovers on the Mars Exploration Rovers (MER) mission, the computational power is still significantly less than that of contemporary desktop microprocessors. It is therefore important to move safely and efficiently through the environment while consuming a minimum amount of computational resources, energy and time. Perception, pose estimation, and motion planning are generally three of the most computationally expensive processes in modern autonomy navigation architectures. An example of this is on the MER where each rover must stop, acquire and process imagery to evaluate its surroundings, estimate the relative change in pose, and generate the next mobility system maneuver [1]. This paper describes improvements in the energy efficiency and speed of planetary rover autonomous traverse accomplished by converting processes typically performed by the CPU onto a Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA) coprocessor. Perception algorithms in general are well suited to FPGA implementations because much of processing is naturally parallelizable. In this paper we present novel implementations of stereo and visual odometry algorithms on a FPGA. The FPGA stereo implementation is an extension of [2] that uses "random in linear out" rectification and a higher-performance interface between the rectification, filter, and disparity stages of the stereo pipeline. The improved visual odometry component utilizes a FPGA implementation of a Harris feature detector and sum of absolute differences (SAD) operator. The FPGA implementation of the stereo and visual odometry functionality have demonstrated a performance improvement of approximately three orders of magnitude compared to the MER-class avionics. These more efficient perception and pose estimation modules have been merged with motion planning techniques that allow for continuous steering and driving to navigate cluttered obstacle fields without stopping to perceive. The resulting faster visual odometry rates also allow for wheel slip to be detected earlier and more reliably. Predictions of resulting improvements in planetary rover energy efficiency and average traverse speeds are reported. In addition, field results are presented that compare the performance of autonomous navigation on the Athena planetary rover prototype using continuous steering or driving and continuous steering and driving with GESTALT traversability analysis using the FPGA perception and pose estimation improvements.
{"title":"Enabling continuous planetary rover navigation through FPGA stereo and visual odometry","authors":"T. Howard, A. Morfopoulos, J. Morrison, Y. Kuwata, C. Villalpando, L. Matthies, M. McHenry","doi":"10.1109/AERO.2012.6187041","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/AERO.2012.6187041","url":null,"abstract":"Safe navigation under resource constraints is a key concern for autonomous planetary rovers operating on extraterrestrial bodies. Computational power in such applications is typically constrained by the radiation hardness and energy consumption requirements. For example, even though the microprocessors used for the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) mission rover are an order of magnitude more powerful than those used for the rovers on the Mars Exploration Rovers (MER) mission, the computational power is still significantly less than that of contemporary desktop microprocessors. It is therefore important to move safely and efficiently through the environment while consuming a minimum amount of computational resources, energy and time. Perception, pose estimation, and motion planning are generally three of the most computationally expensive processes in modern autonomy navigation architectures. An example of this is on the MER where each rover must stop, acquire and process imagery to evaluate its surroundings, estimate the relative change in pose, and generate the next mobility system maneuver [1]. This paper describes improvements in the energy efficiency and speed of planetary rover autonomous traverse accomplished by converting processes typically performed by the CPU onto a Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA) coprocessor. Perception algorithms in general are well suited to FPGA implementations because much of processing is naturally parallelizable. In this paper we present novel implementations of stereo and visual odometry algorithms on a FPGA. The FPGA stereo implementation is an extension of [2] that uses \"random in linear out\" rectification and a higher-performance interface between the rectification, filter, and disparity stages of the stereo pipeline. The improved visual odometry component utilizes a FPGA implementation of a Harris feature detector and sum of absolute differences (SAD) operator. The FPGA implementation of the stereo and visual odometry functionality have demonstrated a performance improvement of approximately three orders of magnitude compared to the MER-class avionics. These more efficient perception and pose estimation modules have been merged with motion planning techniques that allow for continuous steering and driving to navigate cluttered obstacle fields without stopping to perceive. The resulting faster visual odometry rates also allow for wheel slip to be detected earlier and more reliably. Predictions of resulting improvements in planetary rover energy efficiency and average traverse speeds are reported. In addition, field results are presented that compare the performance of autonomous navigation on the Athena planetary rover prototype using continuous steering or driving and continuous steering and driving with GESTALT traversability analysis using the FPGA perception and pose estimation improvements.","PeriodicalId":6421,"journal":{"name":"2012 IEEE Aerospace Conference","volume":"28 1","pages":"1-9"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2012-03-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"73724578","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2012-03-03DOI: 10.1109/AERO.2012.6187148
Y. Poberezhskiy, G. Poberezhskiy
In many applications, software defined receivers (SDRs) can be victims of intentional and/or unintentional jamming. Often, multiple jamming signals (JSs) at their antennas have significantly different power levels. In this paper, suppression of JSs is considered for the most challenging case when some of the JSs are strong enough to desensitize or even damage the input circuits of victim SDRs. Two-stage spatial suppression of JSs is proposed to cope with such a situation. It is shown that this method is effective when the receiver antenna array has an adequate number of elements. Suppression of JSs always requires high dynamic range of victim SDRs. However, the requirements for the dynamic range become even higher when the two-stage spatial suppression of JSs is impossible. Implementation of a novel sampling technique based on a new interpretation of the sampling theorem is the most promising way to increase the dynamic range. If spatial suppression of JSs is impossible, or it is not sufficiently effective, other properties of JSs can be exploited. Adaptive combining of robust and Bayesian approaches is a beneficial anti-jam strategy.
{"title":"Suppression of multiple jammers with significantly different power levels","authors":"Y. Poberezhskiy, G. Poberezhskiy","doi":"10.1109/AERO.2012.6187148","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/AERO.2012.6187148","url":null,"abstract":"In many applications, software defined receivers (SDRs) can be victims of intentional and/or unintentional jamming. Often, multiple jamming signals (JSs) at their antennas have significantly different power levels. In this paper, suppression of JSs is considered for the most challenging case when some of the JSs are strong enough to desensitize or even damage the input circuits of victim SDRs. Two-stage spatial suppression of JSs is proposed to cope with such a situation. It is shown that this method is effective when the receiver antenna array has an adequate number of elements. Suppression of JSs always requires high dynamic range of victim SDRs. However, the requirements for the dynamic range become even higher when the two-stage spatial suppression of JSs is impossible. Implementation of a novel sampling technique based on a new interpretation of the sampling theorem is the most promising way to increase the dynamic range. If spatial suppression of JSs is impossible, or it is not sufficiently effective, other properties of JSs can be exploited. Adaptive combining of robust and Bayesian approaches is a beneficial anti-jam strategy.","PeriodicalId":6421,"journal":{"name":"2012 IEEE Aerospace Conference","volume":"99 1","pages":"1-12"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2012-03-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"73903266","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2012-03-03DOI: 10.1109/AERO.2012.6187038
A. Bowen, C. German, M. Jakuba, J. Kinsey, L. Mayer, D. Yoerger, L. Whitcomb
The Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution has been awarded funds by the National Science Foundation to develop a tethered robotic underwater vehicle for under-ice exploration by 2014. By employing a novel light-weight tether for data-only communications, the vehicle will provide the U.S. Polar Research Community with a capability to tele-operate, under direct real-time human supervision, a remotely-controlled inspection and survey vehicle under fixed ice at ranges up to 20 km distant from a support ship or other deployment site. Physical tethering of an underwater robot is required to provide low-latency, high bandwidth control and real-time data return. The vehicle will enable exploration and detailed exploration in under-ice environments through the use of high-definition video coupled to a suite of chemical and biological sensors. Long-range light-fiber tether technology provides the high bandwidth link necessary for real-time control under the direction of the science party which AUVs cannot meet.
{"title":"Lightly tethered unmanned underwater vehicle for under-ice exploration","authors":"A. Bowen, C. German, M. Jakuba, J. Kinsey, L. Mayer, D. Yoerger, L. Whitcomb","doi":"10.1109/AERO.2012.6187038","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/AERO.2012.6187038","url":null,"abstract":"The Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution has been awarded funds by the National Science Foundation to develop a tethered robotic underwater vehicle for under-ice exploration by 2014. By employing a novel light-weight tether for data-only communications, the vehicle will provide the U.S. Polar Research Community with a capability to tele-operate, under direct real-time human supervision, a remotely-controlled inspection and survey vehicle under fixed ice at ranges up to 20 km distant from a support ship or other deployment site. Physical tethering of an underwater robot is required to provide low-latency, high bandwidth control and real-time data return. The vehicle will enable exploration and detailed exploration in under-ice environments through the use of high-definition video coupled to a suite of chemical and biological sensors. Long-range light-fiber tether technology provides the high bandwidth link necessary for real-time control under the direction of the science party which AUVs cannot meet.","PeriodicalId":6421,"journal":{"name":"2012 IEEE Aerospace Conference","volume":"26 1","pages":"1-12"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2012-03-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"84622981","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2012-03-03DOI: 10.1109/AERO.2012.6187216
Richard J. Barton
Remote sensing is a critical application that supports activities such as environmental monitoring, planetary science, structural shape and health monitoring, non-destructive evaluation, etc. that are critical to many NASA missions. The utility of the remote sensing devices themselves is greatly increased if they are "passive" - that is, they do not require any on-board power supply such as batteries - and if they can be identified uniquely during the sensor interrogation process. In this paper, we consider one very promising passive sensor technology, called surface acoustic wave (SAW) radio-frequency identification (RFID), that satisfies these criteria. Although SAW RFID tags have great potential for use in numerous space-based remote sensing applications, the limited collision resolution capability of current generation tags limits the performance in a cluttered sensing environment. That is, as more SAW-based sensors are added to the environment, numerous tag responses are superimposed at the receiver and decoding all or even a subset of the telemetry becomes increasingly difficult. Background clutter generated by reflectors other than the sensors themselves is also a problem, as is multipath interference and signal distortion, but the limiting factor in many remote sensing applications can be expected to be tag mutual interference. In this paper, we present the results of a research effort aimed at providing answers to the following questions: 1) What are the fundamental relationships between tag parameters such as bit-rate, time-bandwidth-product, SNR, and achievable collision resolution? 2) What are the differences in optimal or near-optimal interrogator designs between noise-limited environments and interference-limited environments? 3) What are the performance characteristics of different interrogator designs in term of parameters such as transmitter power level, range, and number of interfering tags?
{"title":"Achievable performance and effective interrogator design for SAW RFID sensor tags","authors":"Richard J. Barton","doi":"10.1109/AERO.2012.6187216","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/AERO.2012.6187216","url":null,"abstract":"Remote sensing is a critical application that supports activities such as environmental monitoring, planetary science, structural shape and health monitoring, non-destructive evaluation, etc. that are critical to many NASA missions. The utility of the remote sensing devices themselves is greatly increased if they are \"passive\" - that is, they do not require any on-board power supply such as batteries - and if they can be identified uniquely during the sensor interrogation process. In this paper, we consider one very promising passive sensor technology, called surface acoustic wave (SAW) radio-frequency identification (RFID), that satisfies these criteria. Although SAW RFID tags have great potential for use in numerous space-based remote sensing applications, the limited collision resolution capability of current generation tags limits the performance in a cluttered sensing environment. That is, as more SAW-based sensors are added to the environment, numerous tag responses are superimposed at the receiver and decoding all or even a subset of the telemetry becomes increasingly difficult. Background clutter generated by reflectors other than the sensors themselves is also a problem, as is multipath interference and signal distortion, but the limiting factor in many remote sensing applications can be expected to be tag mutual interference. In this paper, we present the results of a research effort aimed at providing answers to the following questions: 1) What are the fundamental relationships between tag parameters such as bit-rate, time-bandwidth-product, SNR, and achievable collision resolution? 2) What are the differences in optimal or near-optimal interrogator designs between noise-limited environments and interference-limited environments? 3) What are the performance characteristics of different interrogator designs in term of parameters such as transmitter power level, range, and number of interfering tags?","PeriodicalId":6421,"journal":{"name":"2012 IEEE Aerospace Conference","volume":"15 1","pages":"1-16"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2012-03-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"85195656","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2012-03-03DOI: 10.1109/AERO.2012.6187183
Tyler Groff, N. Kasdin
Space-based coronagraphs for earth-like planet detection will require focal plane wavefront control to achieve the necessary contrast levels. These correction algorithms are iterative and require an estimate of the electric field at the science camera. In order to maximize science time the correction time must be minimized, which means reducing the number of exposures required for correction. This also means minimizing the number of iterations and the number of exposures per iteration to achieve a targeted contrast. The ideal choice is to use fewer exposures to estimate the electric field with the same level of accuracy. We demonstrate an optimal estimator that uses prior knowledge to create the estimate of the electric field. The performance of this method is compared to a pairwise estimator which is designed to give the least-squares minimal error. This allows us to evaluate the number of images necessary to achieve a contrast target.
{"title":"Optimal wavefront estimation and control using adaptive techniques","authors":"Tyler Groff, N. Kasdin","doi":"10.1109/AERO.2012.6187183","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/AERO.2012.6187183","url":null,"abstract":"Space-based coronagraphs for earth-like planet detection will require focal plane wavefront control to achieve the necessary contrast levels. These correction algorithms are iterative and require an estimate of the electric field at the science camera. In order to maximize science time the correction time must be minimized, which means reducing the number of exposures required for correction. This also means minimizing the number of iterations and the number of exposures per iteration to achieve a targeted contrast. The ideal choice is to use fewer exposures to estimate the electric field with the same level of accuracy. We demonstrate an optimal estimator that uses prior knowledge to create the estimate of the electric field. The performance of this method is compared to a pairwise estimator which is designed to give the least-squares minimal error. This allows us to evaluate the number of images necessary to achieve a contrast target.","PeriodicalId":6421,"journal":{"name":"2012 IEEE Aerospace Conference","volume":"23 1","pages":"1-9"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2012-03-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"81629920","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2012-03-03DOI: 10.1109/AERO.2012.6187147
S. Johnson, R. Reinhart, T. Kacpura
National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is developing an on-orbit, adaptable, Software Defined Radios (SDR)/Space Telecommunications Radio System (STRS)-based testbed facility to conduct a suite of experiments to advance technologies, reduce risk, and enable future mission capabilities. The flight system, referred to as the “SCAN Testbed” will be launched on an HTV-3 no earlier than May of 2012 and will operate on an external pallet on the truss of the International Space Station (ISS) for up to five years. The Communications, Navigation, and Networking reConfigurable Testbed (CoNNeCT) Project, developing the SCAN Testbed, will provide NASA, industry, other Government agencies, and academic partners the opportunity to develop and field communications, navigation, and networking applications in the laboratory and space environment based on reconfigurable, software defined radio platforms and the Space Telecommunications Radio System (STRS) Architecture. Three flight qualified SDRs platforms were developed, each with verified waveforms that are compatible with NASA's Tracking and Data Relay Satellite System (TDRSS). The waveforms and the Operating Environment are compliant with NASA's software defined radio standard architecture, STRS. Each of the three flight model (FM) SDRs has a corresponding breadboard and engineering model (EM) with lower fidelity than the corresponding flight unit. Procuring, developing, and testing SDRs differs from the traditional hardware-based radio approach. Methods to develop hardware platforms need to be tailored to accommodate a “software” application that provides functions traditionally performed in hardware. To accommodate upgrades, the platform must be specified with assumptions for broader application but still be testable and not exceed Size, Weight, and Power (SWaP) expectations. Ideally, the applications (waveforms) operating on the platform should be specified separately to accommodate portability to other platforms and support multiple entities developing the platform from the application. To support future flight upgrades to the flight SDRs, development and verification platforms are necessary in addition to the flight system. This paper provides details on the approach used to procure and develop the SDR systems for CoNNeCT and provide suggestions for similar developments. Unique development approaches for each SDR were used which provides a rare opportunity to compare approaches and provide recommendations for future space missions considering the use of an SDR. Three case studies were examined. In two cases, the SDR vendor (General Dynamics and Harris) was the integrated platform and waveform provider. In these cases, the platform and waveform requirements were considered together by the vendor using high level analysis to support the division of the requirements. In the Harris SDR case, the platform and waveform specification was then integrated into a single document. This case study was f
{"title":"CoNNeCT's approach for the development of three Software Defined Radios for space application","authors":"S. Johnson, R. Reinhart, T. Kacpura","doi":"10.1109/AERO.2012.6187147","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/AERO.2012.6187147","url":null,"abstract":"National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is developing an on-orbit, adaptable, Software Defined Radios (SDR)/Space Telecommunications Radio System (STRS)-based testbed facility to conduct a suite of experiments to advance technologies, reduce risk, and enable future mission capabilities. The flight system, referred to as the “SCAN Testbed” will be launched on an HTV-3 no earlier than May of 2012 and will operate on an external pallet on the truss of the International Space Station (ISS) for up to five years. The Communications, Navigation, and Networking reConfigurable Testbed (CoNNeCT) Project, developing the SCAN Testbed, will provide NASA, industry, other Government agencies, and academic partners the opportunity to develop and field communications, navigation, and networking applications in the laboratory and space environment based on reconfigurable, software defined radio platforms and the Space Telecommunications Radio System (STRS) Architecture. Three flight qualified SDRs platforms were developed, each with verified waveforms that are compatible with NASA's Tracking and Data Relay Satellite System (TDRSS). The waveforms and the Operating Environment are compliant with NASA's software defined radio standard architecture, STRS. Each of the three flight model (FM) SDRs has a corresponding breadboard and engineering model (EM) with lower fidelity than the corresponding flight unit. Procuring, developing, and testing SDRs differs from the traditional hardware-based radio approach. Methods to develop hardware platforms need to be tailored to accommodate a “software” application that provides functions traditionally performed in hardware. To accommodate upgrades, the platform must be specified with assumptions for broader application but still be testable and not exceed Size, Weight, and Power (SWaP) expectations. Ideally, the applications (waveforms) operating on the platform should be specified separately to accommodate portability to other platforms and support multiple entities developing the platform from the application. To support future flight upgrades to the flight SDRs, development and verification platforms are necessary in addition to the flight system. This paper provides details on the approach used to procure and develop the SDR systems for CoNNeCT and provide suggestions for similar developments. Unique development approaches for each SDR were used which provides a rare opportunity to compare approaches and provide recommendations for future space missions considering the use of an SDR. Three case studies were examined. In two cases, the SDR vendor (General Dynamics and Harris) was the integrated platform and waveform provider. In these cases, the platform and waveform requirements were considered together by the vendor using high level analysis to support the division of the requirements. In the Harris SDR case, the platform and waveform specification was then integrated into a single document. This case study was f","PeriodicalId":6421,"journal":{"name":"2012 IEEE Aerospace Conference","volume":"28 1","pages":"1-13"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2012-03-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"84635365","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2012-03-03DOI: 10.1109/AERO.2012.6187170
B. Cooke, R. Thompson, S. Standley
Launched by NASA on 6 March 2009, the Kepler Mission has been observing more than 100,000 targets in a single patch of sky between the constellations Cygnus and Lyra almost continuously for the last two years looking for planetary systems using the transit method. As of October 2011, the Kepler spacecraft has collected and returned to Earth just over 290 GB of data, identifying 1235 planet candidates with 25 of these candidates confirmed as planets via ground observation. Extracting the telltale signature of a planetary system from stellar photometry where valid signal transients can be as small as a 40 ppm is a difficult and exacting task. The end-to-end process of determining planetary candidates from noisy, raw photometric measurements is discussed. The Kepler mission is described in overview and the Kepler technique for discovering exoplanets is discussed. The design and implementation of the Kepler spacecraft, tracing the data path from photons entering the telescope aperture through raw observation data transmitted to the ground operations team is described. The technical challenges of operating a large aperture photometer with an unprecedented 95 million pixel detector are addressed as well as the onboard technique for processing and reducing the large volume of data produced by the Kepler photometer. The technique and challenge of day-to-day mission operations that result in a very high percentage of time on target is discussed. This includes the day to day process for monitoring and managing the health of the spacecraft, the annual process for maintaining sun on the solar arrays while still keeping the telescope pointed at the fixed science target, the process for safely but rapidly returning to science operations after a spacecraft initiated safing event and the long term anomaly resolution process. The ground data processing pipeline, from the point that science data is received on the ground to the presentation of preliminary planetary candidates and supporting data to the science team for further evaluation is discussed. Ground management, control, exchange and storage of Kepler's large and growing data set is discussed as well as the process and techniques for removing noise sources and applying calibrations to intermediate data products.
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Pub Date : 2012-03-03DOI: 10.1109/AERO.2012.6187054
Ying Lin
In order to establish a creditable biological contamination transport model for predicting the cross contamination risk during spacecraft assembly and upon landing on Mars, it is important to determine the quantity and size distribution of bacterial spore containing particles on the surface of spacecraft in cleanroom. We conducted an extensive set of air and surface sampling in indoor, outdoor, and cleanroom environments and determined the ratios of the number of spore forming bacteria to that of their dust particle carriers of various sizes. We found that the average number of cultivable spore forming bacteria on particles of >; 7 microns is ~ 10-2 while on particles of <; 1 microns ~ 10-6. Our data also confirmed the existence of multiple spores on a single particle. The results from these studies are essential for developing a reliable biological contamination transport model for meeting the Planetary Protection requirements for future Mars Missions.
{"title":"Quantitative determination of bacterial spore association with particles in cleanroom environment","authors":"Ying Lin","doi":"10.1109/AERO.2012.6187054","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/AERO.2012.6187054","url":null,"abstract":"In order to establish a creditable biological contamination transport model for predicting the cross contamination risk during spacecraft assembly and upon landing on Mars, it is important to determine the quantity and size distribution of bacterial spore containing particles on the surface of spacecraft in cleanroom. We conducted an extensive set of air and surface sampling in indoor, outdoor, and cleanroom environments and determined the ratios of the number of spore forming bacteria to that of their dust particle carriers of various sizes. We found that the average number of cultivable spore forming bacteria on particles of >; 7 microns is ~ 10-2 while on particles of <; 1 microns ~ 10-6. Our data also confirmed the existence of multiple spores on a single particle. The results from these studies are essential for developing a reliable biological contamination transport model for meeting the Planetary Protection requirements for future Mars Missions.","PeriodicalId":6421,"journal":{"name":"2012 IEEE Aerospace Conference","volume":"22 1","pages":"1-7"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2012-03-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"85351589","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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