North American Space Symposium Low Cost Ground Station Design for Nanosatellite Missions

ABSTRACT: This paper deals with the design and implementation of a fully capable ground station used to facilitate communications for nanosatellite missions. Nanosatellite missions by their very nature follow a philosophy of a low cost and rapid development cycle and as such the ground station design is constrained to fall within this same framework. To demonstrate the feasibility of such an approach, an S-Band/UHF/VHF ground station design that was implemented for the CanX-2 nanosatellite mission at the University of Toronto Institute for Aerospace Studies Space Flight Laboratory (UTIAS/SFL) is discussed. The design utilizes a central TNC based on a GFSK modem and a single-board ARM computer running an open-source Linux kernel with all other software developed in-house. The TNC is responsible for (de)modulation, control of ground station hardware and the necessary orbital tracking of the spacecraft. A commercially available actuator used for antenna pointing interfaces with a custom rotator controller that provides added mechanical fault detection. A GUI software application running on standard PCs acts as the satellite’s operating environment. This GUI connects to the ground station TNC using TCP/IP and even permits scientists to remotely control their own experiments onboard the satellite. The software and hardware used for this ground station was designed to be modular so that the system could be easily modified and upgraded to meet the needs of future missions. The current ground station has been successfully tested by tracking and receiving signals from other orbiting satellites and is prepared for full operation after CanX-2’s launch in mid 2007