Speaker
Description
Lunar Gateway is central to the Artemis missions for returning to the Moon for scientific discovery and chart a path for the first human missions to Mars.
This space station will be a multi-purpose outpost supporting lunar surface missions, science in lunar orbit and human exploration further into the cosmos.
Thales Alenia Space has signed a contract with the European Space Agency to develop ESPRIT (European System Providing Refueling, Infrastructure and Telecommunications) for the upcoming lunar space station.
The HLCS (Halo Lunar Communication System), is a fundamental element of ESPRIT, and it provides S-Band and Ka-Band uplink and downlink with search and tracking function.
In the field of communications and tracking, we will focus on the the K-Band Transceiver (KBT), a nodal element of the HLCS subsystem developed by Thales Alenia Space.
The KBT equipment uses a novel System-On-Chip based on the PolarFireRT FPGA from MICROCHIP and implementing the processing features related to the Lunar communications, e.g.:
• SpaceWire interface towards the ESPRIT on-board computer (COM-HUB)
• LDPC coding and decoding functions
• SRRC-OQPSK demodulation up to 50 Msps
• SRRC-OQPSK modulation up to 20 Msps
• FFT on the receiver side and local sweeping on the transmitter side for autonomous establishing of the Lunar link
The KBT SoC embeds the LEON2FT Processor that is in charge of equipment-level management and low rate signal processing tasks. It also includes the “daiFPU” Floating Point Unit (from daiteq s.r.o.) used to implement fine power estimation algorithms as needed for supporting the antenna pointing towards the Lunar asset.
The presentation will provide a thorough overview of the equipment architectural design placing special emphasis on the relevant digital core based on SoC outlined above.
Affiliation of author(s)
Thales Alenia Space
| Track | FPGAs: High Performance |
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