Cascade: a Ka-Band Smallsat System Providing Global Movement of Extremely Large Data Files

The Canadian CASSIOPE small satellite mission: The enhanced polar outflow probe and Cascade technology demonstration payloads

“…The Cascade concept entails the uplink of a large volume (gigabytes) of data from a ground transmission terminal at any location on Earth to an orbiting satellite, and the subsequent downlink of the data to a ground receiving terminal at another location on Earth within a short period of time (95% of data within 24 h) with a very low data error rate (no worse than 10 À 17 bit error rate) [9]. The store-and-forward concept is aimed at non-real-time transfer of large data volumes from or to any remote or otherwise difficult-to-access location on Earth, e.g.…”

Simulation of rain fading and scintillation on Ka-band Earth-LEO satellite links

“…Current interest in Ka-band Earth-LEO links has been mostly driven by the possibility of: (1) retrieving gigabytes of data from Earth observation and scientific satellites during a single pass over an earth station [4] and (2) transferring terabytes of data between any two locations on Earth within twenty-four hours using a store-and-forward data transfer scheme based upon specialized LEO-based communications satellites [5]. In both cases, the objective is to accomplish such transfers of large amounts of data more efficiently and less expensively than by relaying the data through a satellite in GEO.…”