Speaker
Description
Tesat is one of the major suppliers of RF and optical downlink solutions in Europe. The key component of RF downlinksis the so-called Modulator, which encodes and modulates the downlink data onto an RF carrier either in X-band or Ka-band. Within the last 20 years, TESAT has developed various X-band and Ka-band Modulators which are flying on LEO earth observation satellites(e.g. Biomass), GEO communication satellites (e.g. EDRS) as well as on a L3 mission (JWST).
The latest development is the so-called Gigabit Modulator (TETRA) . This modulator is able to transmit user data ata rate of to 2 Gbps either in X-band or Ka-band. It applies the CCSDS 131.2-B-1 standard and supports ACM and VCM operations. Flight models of the Gigabit Modulator are currently in manufacturing for the Copernicus Expansion missions.
TESAT was part of the Hi-SIDE consortium who developed and built up a demonstrator of a high speed on-board network.This network is based on SpaceFibre. It allows to route data between on-board equipment (e.g. instruments, mass memory, modulators) at data rates up to 40 Gbps.
Recently the development of the new generation of the Gigabit Modulator (TETRA-NEXT) has been started. This Modulatorwill be able to transmit downlink data at a rate of 6.3 Gbps per channel. It will be equipped with an optical data interface.
TESAT is also building Laser Communication Terminals for direct-to-earth transmission in cooperation with the Instituteof Communication and Navigation of the German DLR. This has also been part of the Hi-SIDE activity. Therefore the same solutions will also be applied to these products.
In this paper/ presentation an overview of the existing downlink equipment and the new developments at TESAT with focuson the data interfaces will be provided.
