International Telemetering Conference Proceedings / October 21, 2002 / Town & Country Hotel and Conference Center, San Diego, California / The Air Force Flight Test Center in association with the Range Commanders Council (RCC) Range Safety Group is conducting a program that will explore the next generation of ground-based flight termination technology, known as the Enhanced Flight Termination System (EFTS) program. The first part of the program was successfully concluded in May 2002. The Government is leading this program with support from contractors, academia, and other RCC groups including the Telemetry Group, Frequency Management Group, and Telecommunications and Timing Group. Additionally, the National Security Agency is providing key support along with vendors who design, build and test range safety systems. This paper will discuss details of the design validation and development phases (part two) of the EFTS program. Redesign of flight termination receivers and ground system modification plans will be discussed as well as flight and ground hardware testing objectives.

International Telemetering Conference Proceedings / October 27-30, 1997 / Riviera Hotel and Convention Center, Las Vegas, Nevada / The Vessel Traffic Management System is a cooperative effort of the Naval Undersea Warfare Center and the Naval Air Warfare Center Aircraft Division, funded by the OSD's Test Technology Development and Demonstration Program. The project is establishing the capability to acquire ship tracking information from numerous sources (GPS and radar target extractors), and combine them into a comprehensive, integrated view of the range safety target area. The consolidated tracking information will be transmitted to range safety vessel personnel and presented on portable display systems to aid in clearing the surveillance area of unauthorized vessels. The communications module is media independent in that positional and image data can be routed via RF modem, cellular phone, Intranet or Internet, singly or in any combination. The software systems for data acquisition, display and control are also platform independent, with the system under development operating under WindowsNT and Windows95. Additionally, the use of Java and VRML tools permits a user to display data (including three dimensional presentations of the data) without requiring the applications software. This system has numerous applications including range safety, commercial vessel traffic management, port authority and services monitoring, and oceanographic data gathering.

ITC/USA 2005 Conference Proceedings / The Forty-First Annual International Telemetering Conference and Technical Exhibition / October 24-27, 2005 / Riviera Hotel & Convention Center, Las Vegas, Nevada / The PAM representation was used to formulate a reduced-complexity detector for the Enhanced Flight Termination System (EFTS) whose performance is 5.6 dB better than limiter-discriminator detection when no phase noise is present and 3.4 dB better in the presence of expected phase noise in EFTS.

International Telemetering Conference Proceedings / October 22-25, 2001 / Riviera Hotel and Convention Center, Las Vegas, Nevada / The Range Commanders Council (RCC) Range Safety Group (RSG) is conducting a study into the next generation of ground-based flight termination technology, known as the Enhanced Flight Termination System (EFTS) study. The study was initiated by the RCC in April 2000 and scheduled to be complete in March 2002. The Government is performing the study with support from contractors and academia. In addition to the RSG, the Telemetry Group, Frequency Management Group, Telecommunications and Timing Group of the RCC support the study. Additionally, the National Security Agency is providing key support along with vendors who design, build, and test range safety systems. This paper will describe the background, goals, and current status of the study.

International Telemetering Conference Proceedings / October 20-23, 2003 / Riviera Hotel and Convention Center, Las Vegas, Nevada / Range Safety Systems are used for destruction of a vehicle should a malfunction cause the vehicle to veer off course. All vehicles launched into space require implementation of a Range Safety System. For years the IRIG receivers have been used with relatively good success. Unfortunately, the IRIG receivers do not provide a high level of security. High alphabet receivers were later developed for use on the big launchers (Atlas, Delta, Titan, etc) and the manned missions (Shuttle) to provide added security. With the IRIG based system, several problems have occurred resulting in the loss millions of dollars worth of equipment. Due to the problems that have occurred it has become apparent that there is a need for a more secure, low cost, type of range safety receiver. This paper describes the design and development of the prototype EFTS system. Mission critical parameters are discussed including selection of the encryption and forward error correction algorithms. Actual measured performance including message error rate characteristic is presented.

International Telemetering Conference Proceedings / October 21, 2002 / Town & Country Hotel and Conference Center, San Diego, California / Next generation flight termination systems (FTSs) will use digital technologies to verify the authenticity of range safety commands by command receiver-decoders located on each vehicle. This paper will discuss the general principles behind simplex message authentication using a block encryption cipher, and presents examples for demonstration.

International Telemetering Conference Proceedings / October 30-November 02, 1995 / Riviera Hotel, Las Vegas, Nevada / This paper examines the issues involved in replacing the current Range safety infrastructure with an autonomous range safety system based on GPS (Global Positioning Satellite) integrated navigation system solutions. Range safety is required in the first place because current launch vehicle navigation systems cannot meet a level of trust needed to determine if the mission is really under control and on course. Existing launch vehicle navigation is generally based on attitude and acceleration sensing instrumentation that are subject to drift, initialization errors and failures. Thus, a launch vehicle can easily be under the control of a seemingly operating navigation system, yet be steering the launch vehicle along an incorrect and dangerous flight path. Inertial-based navigation systems are good, but they cannot be trusted. The function of Range safety is to assure that untrustworthy navigation is backed up with a trusted system that has positive knowledge of the launch vehicle location, and the intelligence to decide when and where a launch vehicle must be destroyed. Combining inertial navigation, GPS derived position information and knowledge-based computer control has the potential to provide trusted and autonomous Range safety functions. The issues of autonomous Range safety are addressed in this paper.

International Telemetering Conference Proceedings / October 20-23, 2003 / Riviera Hotel and Convention Center, Las Vegas, Nevada / A Flight Safety System (RAFS) for multiple, reliable Unmanned Air Vehicles (UAV’s) capable of flying Over-the-Horizon (OTH) and outside test range airspace. In addition to the flight safety application, the described full-duplex data link is suitable as a backup command and control link for UAV’s, and for sensor control & data exfiltration. The IRIDIUM satellite system was selected to provide the communications link and because of its global coverage and requisite data throughputs. A Risk Reduction activity ensued to quantify IRIDIUM performance. Hardware and software was developed to demonstrate the feasibility of using IRIDIUM in a flight safety scenario.

ITC/USA 2009 Conference Proceedings / The Forty-Fifth Annual International Telemetering Conference and Technical Exhibition / October 26-29, 2009 / Riviera Hotel & Convention Center, Las Vegas, Nevada / Most range safety telemetry tracking systems have antenna designs that feature an S-band (2200-2400 MHz) Telemetry Tracking and UHF-Band (400-450 MHz) Command Destruct feed along side an omni-directional antenna. The antennas must have, by design, high angular velocity (w) and acceleration (α) parameters to achieve these tasks. Generally, these parameters are user configurable through software and monitored through BIT (Built In Test) log files. The parameters are nominally set to their maximum values (ie. w=10 deg/sec and α = 15 deg/sec².) Considering the dynamics of a sample satellite launch vs. the ground tracking and omni antennas' combined capabilities, this document analyzes whether the target will stay within the beam.

ITC/USA 2007 Conference Proceedings / The Forty-Third Annual International Telemetering Conference and Technical Exhibition / October 22-25, 2007 / Riviera Hotel & Convention Center, Las Vegas, Nevada / This paper presents a case study of the Western Range Centralized Telemetry Processing Subsystem (WR CTPS). This system was developed by Lockheed Martin Integrated Systems and Global Services and L-3 Communications Telemetry-West as part of the Range Standardization and Automation (RSA) IIA program. Requirements included real-time simultaneous acquisition of 16 PCM streams at rates of up to 30M bits per second; real-time processing; and data display on workstations connected over a gigabit Ethernet network. This system is designed for range safety and needs to be fault-tolerant while maintaining 100 percent data availability in the event of a single failure during an operation. The development of such a system demanded a rigorous Systems Engineering approach to ensure the successful upgrade and deployment onto the range infrastructure. This case study provides an overview of the system technical requirements and its architecture. The summary presents challenges encountered during the development and lessons learned while meeting them.