IEEE Aerospace and Electronic Systems Magazine - July 2020 - 16

Improving Small Satellite Communications in Deep Space

Figure 4.
DSOC Overview (Credit: Abhijit Biswas, JPL).

beacon for pointing adds to optical terminal complexity,
and requires infrastructure on the ground; additionally, for
SmallSats with smaller optical telescope sizes, it reduces
spacecraft operational range. Recently, a CubeSat mission
named ASTERIA [54] demonstrated subarcsecond pointing accuracy via star tracking. This approach seems promising for Deep Space SmallSats because it could
potentially allow optical communications without an
uplink beacon.
Since a low-cost optical ground structure does not yet
exist, it is recommended that the planetary SmallSat community continue the evaluation of this technology for further maturation. Considering the great interest in DSOC, it
is hoped that technology readiness for SmallSats occurs
sooner rather than later.5

SMALLSAT TELECOMMUNICATIONS EQUIPMENT
In this section, we will discuss radios, power amplifiers
(PA), and antennas for SmallSats. The objective is to
review the present capability and note improvements
5

The DSN is adding a hybrid RF optical ground station at its Goldstone complex with expected delivery date of 2025.

16

that are necessary for increasing SmallSat communications capability based on the analysis of the previous
section.

RADIOS FOR SMALLSATS
The Iris transponder is the most recent radio development
for SmallSats [9]. Figure 5 shows a photo of the Iris radio.
This radio provides X-band communications and coherent
two-way range and Doppler. In addition to the above, Iris
also generates differential one-way ranging (DOR) tones
for delta DOR measurements. Even though it is designed
to also support higher data rates, at its present delivery it
supports raw downlink bit rates up to 256 kb/s. Its mass
and volume are 1.2 kg and 0.5U, respectively; and at 4 W
RF output, it draws 38 W of power. An earlier version of
Iris was used by the MarCO spacecraft, and its latest version will fly with several Artemis 1 (formerly EM-16)
CubeSats.
6

EM-1 (Exploration Mission-1) is the un-crewed first planned flight
of NASA's Space Launch System and the second flight of the Orion
Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle. The CubeSats in Tables 3 and 4 will
be launched in 2020 as secondary payloads of EM-1. Note that
NASA has recently renamed the EM-1 mission Artemis 1.

IEEE A&E SYSTEMS MAGAZINE

JULY 2020



IEEE Aerospace and Electronic Systems Magazine - July 2020

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