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AN AUTONOMOUS SATELLITE TRACKING STATION

International Telemetering Conference Proceedings / October 25-28, 1999 / Riviera Hotel and Convention Center, Las Vegas, Nevada / In 1998, AlliedSignal Technical Services (ATSC) installed three fully autonomous 13-meter satellite tracking systems for the Integrated Program Office of the National Oceanic
and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) at the Command and Data Acquisition Station
near Fairbanks, Alaska. These systems track and command NOAA Polar Orbiting Weather
Satellites and Defense Meteorological Satellites.
Each tracking system operates for extended periods of time with little intervention other
than periodic scheduling contacts. Schedule execution initiates equipment configuration,
including establishing the RF communications link to the satellite. Station autonomy is
achieved through use of a robust scheduler that permits remote users and the System Administrator
to request pass activities for any of the supported missions. Spacecraft in the
mission set are scheduled for normal operations according to the priority they have been
assigned. Once the scheduler resolves conflicts, it builds a human-readable control script
that executes all required support activities. Pass adds or deletes generate new schedule
scripts and can be performed in seconds.
The systems can be configured to support CCSDS and TDM telemetry processing, but the
units installed at Fairbanks required only telemetry and command through-put capabilities.
Received telemetry data is buffered on disk-storage for immediate, post-pass playback,
and also on tape for long-term archiving purposes. The system can autonomously support
up to 20 spacecraft with 5 different configuration setups each. L-Band, S-Band and X-Band
frequencies are supported.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:arizona.edu/oai:arizona.openrepository.com:10150/607307
Date10 1900
CreatorsAnderson, Mike, Militch, Peter, Pickens, Hugh
ContributorsAlliedSignal Technical Services
PublisherInternational Foundation for Telemetering
Source SetsUniversity of Arizona
Languageen_US
Detected LanguageEnglish
Typetext, Proceedings
RightsCopyright © International Foundation for Telemetering
Relationhttp://www.telemetry.org/

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