Kaua‘i Community College (Kaua‘i CC) is presently participating in an effort to develop a space industry in Hawai‘i. This effort includes future launches of University of Hawai‘i supported micro-class satellites from the Pacific Missile Range Facility at Barking Sands, Kaua‘i. Kaua‘i CC’s participation is represented by operation and maintenance of a ground station, located on campus, to suppor...

In this paper, we investigated the capacity and bit error rate (BER) performance of Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO) satellite systems with single and multiple dual polarized satellites in geostationary orbit and a mobile ground receiving station with multiple antennas. We evaluated the effects of both system parameters such as number of satellites, number of receive antennas, and SNR and ...

Artificial satellites were first deployed in the late 1950s. They have since brought about enormous progress in telecommunications. All communication satellites in their simplest form are concerned mainly with information communication from a source (transmitter) on the ground to a sink (receiver) that is at a geographically dispersed location through a satellite in space (acting as a retransmi...

A series of ongoing experiments are being conducted at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center to explore integrated ground and space-based software architectures enabling sensor webs. A sensor web, as defined by Steve Talabac at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center(GSFC), is a coherent set of distributed nodes interconnected by a communications fabric, that collectively behave as a single, dynamicall...

The main objective of this study is to compare the erythemal UV irradiance (UVER) and spectral UV irradiances (at 305, 310 and 324 nm) from the Ozone Monitoring Instrument (OMI) onboard NASA EOS/Aura polar sun-synchronous satellite (launched in July 2004, local equator crossing time 01:45 p.m.) with ground-based measurements from the Brewer spectrophotometer #150 located at El Arenosillo (South...

I will discuss how time and frequency information can be distributed using satellites. I will focus on using the signals transmitted by the US global positioning system satellites, but I will also discuss other satellite-based systems such as the Russian GLONASS system, the proposed European Galileo System and two-way satellite time transfer, which uses active ground stations that communicate w...

A common challenge in developing small-satellite-based Earth-observation (EO) missions is getting the data to the ground. Typically, most satellites download data via space-to-ground radio-frequency (RF) links, communicating directly with fixed ground stations as the satellites fly within range. For many next-generation EO missions, such as hyperspectral imaging or SAR missions, the volume of d...

It is well known that GPS C/A codes present cross correlation peak potentially causing false acquisitions. These cross-correlations peaks can in addition cause tracking errors and C/No degradation [1], [2], [3] and [4], not in traditional GPS tracking situations, but for applications where signals are received with low Doppler. There are several applications that can have low relative Doppler, ...

There is an increasing desire in many organizations, including NASA and the DoD, to use constellations or fleets of autonomous spacecraft working together to accomplish complex mission objectives. At the Air Force Research Laboratory’s (AFRL) Space Vehicles Directorate we are investigating and developing architectures for commanding and controlling a cluster of cooperating satellites. For many ...