Session
Weekday Session 10: Ground Systems
Location
Utah State University, Logan, UT
Abstract
In recent years, The University of Colorado Boulder’s Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP) has grown its SmallSat Operations (SMOPS) program into a large team of students and professionals managing the operations of multiple SmallSat missions. The team responsible for the on-site ground station (GSOPS) includes a small team of students alongside professionals who help manage the on-site UHF and S-band antennas, making use of open-source, commercial, and in-house software. In this process, the student ground station team has adapted the limited time and resources of a single ground station to accommodate the needs and science objectives of multiple missions. These accommodations include the development of best practices for scheduling around pass overlap, the design of automation capable of handling multiple missions without manual reconfiguration, and the implementation of robust error handling and intuitive paging to reduce the need for human intervention. This paper describes in more detail the students’ perspective on the challenges and creative solutions of maintaining and improving the ground station.
Enabling Mission Success: A Student's Perspective on Developing a Ground Station
Utah State University, Logan, UT
In recent years, The University of Colorado Boulder’s Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP) has grown its SmallSat Operations (SMOPS) program into a large team of students and professionals managing the operations of multiple SmallSat missions. The team responsible for the on-site ground station (GSOPS) includes a small team of students alongside professionals who help manage the on-site UHF and S-band antennas, making use of open-source, commercial, and in-house software. In this process, the student ground station team has adapted the limited time and resources of a single ground station to accommodate the needs and science objectives of multiple missions. These accommodations include the development of best practices for scheduling around pass overlap, the design of automation capable of handling multiple missions without manual reconfiguration, and the implementation of robust error handling and intuitive paging to reduce the need for human intervention. This paper describes in more detail the students’ perspective on the challenges and creative solutions of maintaining and improving the ground station.
