International Telemetering Conference Proceedings / October 26-29, 1992 / Town and Country Hotel and Convention Center, San Diego, California / In the event of a NASA Space Shuttle mission landing at the While Sands Missile Range, White Sands, New Mexico, a data communications system for processing Shuttle’s telemetry data has been installed there in the Master Control Telemetry Station, JIG-56. This data system required a Viterbi decoder since the Shuttle’s data is convolutionally encoded. However, the Shuttle uses a nonstandard code, and the manufacturer which in the past has provided decoders for Shuttle support, no longer produces them. Since no other company produced a Viterbi decoder designed to decode the shuttle’s data, it was necessary to develop the required decoder. The purpose of this paper is to describe the functional performance requirements and design of this decoder.

International Telemetering Conference Proceedings / October 28-31, 1996 / Town and Country Hotel and Convention Center, San Diego, California / The Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous (NEAR) satellite will travel to the asteroid 433 Eros, arriving there early in 1999, and orbit the asteroid for 1 year taking measurements that will map the surface features and determine its elemental composition. NEAR is the first satellite to use the rate-1/6 convolutional encoding on its telemetry downlink. Due to the scarcity and complexity of full decoders, APL designed and built a less capable but inexpensive version of the decoder for use in the integration, test, and prelaunch checkout of the rate-1/6 encoder. This paper describes the rationale for the design, how it works, and the features that are included.