A Portable Autonomous Ground Station to Support a Constellation of CubeSats

Ground systems have historically been large installations consisting of massive infrastructure and complex software systems requiring significant human effort to construct and operate. In support of the Prometheus project at Los Alamos National Laboratory, which launched a constellation of eight 1.5U CubeSats in November 2013, we developed a portable autonomous ground system. The system consists of a combination of commercial off the shelf components, a custom software defined radio packaged into a small rugged box, and a single custom software application. One of the goals of the project was to make a system that could be deployed in a remote location, setup in a day by two people, and that could autonomously complete the system’s data transfer mission. The single software application was designed to provide command and control, mission configuration, situational awareness, real-time monitoring, state of health (SOH) analysis, and mission data transfer. In addition, the software graphical interface was designed to be used by a non-space professional with less than a week of training. The Prometheus satellites are currently on-orbit and have demonstrated the mission’s store and forward capability. Four ground stations were setup as part of the project. Each of the ground stations has been used to automatically; switch between satellites, downlink SOH data, downlink mission data, and uplink operational configuration data. This paper describes the ground system in detail and the hardware and software designs used to keep the system simple while providing significant capability