NASA Near Earth Network (NEN) and Space Network (SN) CubeSat Communications

Abstract

There has been a recent trend to increase capability and drive down the Size, Weight and Power (SWAP) of satellites. NASA scientists and engineers across many of NASA's Mission Directorates and Centers are developing exciting CubeSat concepts and welcome potential partnerships for CubeSat endeavors. From a "Telemetry, Tracking and Command (TT&C) Systems and Flight Operations for Small Satellites" point of view, small satellites including CubeSats are a challenge to coordinate because of existing small spacecraft constraints, such as limited SWAP and attitude control, and the potential for high numbers of operational spacecraft. The NASA Space Communications and Navigation (SCaN) Program's Near Earth Network (NEN) and Space Network (SN) are customer driven organizations that provide comprehensive communications services for space assets including data transport between a mission's orbiting satellite and its Mission Operations Center (MOC). This paper presents how well the SCaN networks, SN and NEN, are currently positioned to support the emerging small small satellite and CubeSat market as well as planned enhancements for future support.

CubeSat Communications: Recent Advances and Future Challenges

“…In [24], the authors summarized the support, services, and future plans provided to the emerging CubeSat market by NASA's Near Earth Network (NEN), Space Network (SN), and space communication and navigation network (SCaN). The work presented in [24] also discussed the capabilities of the NEN and SN, illustrating the maximum achievable data rates and data volumes for different orbit altitudes and slant ranges. The literature on the development of CubeSat antennas was summarized is [25], which discussed the antennas used for Ref.…”

“…Year Area of Focus Bouwmeester et al [19] 2010 History of CubeSat missions from 2000 to 2009 Michael et al [20] 2013 History and statistics of CubeSats missions from 2000 to 2012 Joyeeta et al [21] 2013 Deep space networks and interplanetary internet Thyrso et al [22] 2016 History and statistics of CubeSats missions from 2000 to 2016 Radhika et al [23] 2016 Inter-satellite communications for Cube-Sats Scott et al [24] 2016 NASA's near earth network and space network for CubeSats Yahya et al [25] 2017 Antenna designing for CubeSats Martin [26] 2018 History, statistics, and applications of CubeSats missions Franco et al [27] 2018 small satellite missions, antennas design, and networking Anna et al [28] 2018 Hardware challenges for CubeSat missions This paper 2019 coverage and constellation issues, channel modeling, modulation and coding, networking, and future research challenges for CubeSats CubeSats such as horn, patch, dipole, reflector, and membrane antennas. Recently, the literature on evolution, constraints, policies, and applications of small satellites was presented in [26].…”

“…In summary, most of the above surveys focus on details of missions, e.g., number of missions, number of CubeSats, launching dates, participating countries, and mission targets [19], [20], [22], [26]. However, only few surveys discuss the communications aspects of CubeSats, e.g., inter-satellite networking [21], antenna design [27], and delay tolerant networking [24].…”

“…On the contrary, the available bandwidth at S-band for NASA missions is 5 MHz. Therefore, higher-order modulations, e.g., 8-phase shift keying (PSK) with rate-7/8 LDPC code, are essential to improve the spectrum efficiency [24], [73].…”

“…Several modulation schemes are used in CubeSats such as quadrature phase shift keying (QPSK), offset QPSK (OQPSK), M -PSK, M -asymmetric PSK (PSK), M -quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) with M ∈ {4, 8, 16, 32}. The performance of these schemes was investigated in [24] for various FEC coding rates and channel impairments like non-linearity. It was shown that higher-order modulations are vulnerable to the non-linear distortion, resulted from the power amplifier at the CubeSat, with an exception to 16-PSK, as it requires only a quasi-linear power amplifier.…”