All 2015 Content
Session
Technical Session VII: Opportunities, Trends and Initiatives
Abstract
The increasing launch pace of small satellites and CubeSats presents a growing challenge to identify and locate newly launched satellites. This impacts mission success primarily through the inability to consistently perform rapid and accurate determination of satellite identity and orbital location after deployment. This paper proposes an approach to resolve this issue through a simple radio and message broadcast standard providing definitive identification, location, and operational state data on a low power, very low data rate subcarrier. Called RILDOS (Radio with Identity and Location Data for Operations and SSA [Space Situational Awareness]), this would be an open standard available for use in new systems. RILDOS is a repeating, unencrypted message broadcast with a unique identifier, timestamp, spacecraft derived position / velocity / acceleration, and predefined emergency flags. The spread spectrum signal is transmitted at a low power and very low data rate and can be radiated continuously or only while in contact. Centering the signal underneath the primary radio frequency for the satellite avoids the need for additional frequency deconfliction or a secondary radio. Cycling every ten seconds, a short collection gathers enough data for an orbital determination as well as top level status about the health of the satellite.
RILDOS: A Beaconing Standard for Small Satellite Identification and Situational Awareness
The increasing launch pace of small satellites and CubeSats presents a growing challenge to identify and locate newly launched satellites. This impacts mission success primarily through the inability to consistently perform rapid and accurate determination of satellite identity and orbital location after deployment. This paper proposes an approach to resolve this issue through a simple radio and message broadcast standard providing definitive identification, location, and operational state data on a low power, very low data rate subcarrier. Called RILDOS (Radio with Identity and Location Data for Operations and SSA [Space Situational Awareness]), this would be an open standard available for use in new systems. RILDOS is a repeating, unencrypted message broadcast with a unique identifier, timestamp, spacecraft derived position / velocity / acceleration, and predefined emergency flags. The spread spectrum signal is transmitted at a low power and very low data rate and can be radiated continuously or only while in contact. Centering the signal underneath the primary radio frequency for the satellite avoids the need for additional frequency deconfliction or a secondary radio. Cycling every ten seconds, a short collection gathers enough data for an orbital determination as well as top level status about the health of the satellite.
