Description
The objective of the activity is to design, develop and test payload technologies compliant with multi-beam receivers for satellite-based air traffic surveillance. Critical breadboarding will be carried out to demonstrate the concept suitable for use on small satellites in LEO or MEO. Targeted Improvements: 50% reduced payload power consumption, mass and volume compared to current technology.Increase the probability of message detection by a factor of 2. Description: The World Radiocommunication Conference (WRC) in 2015 made a primary allocation of frequency band 1087.7 to 1092.3 MHz for satellite reception of Secondary Surveillance Radar (SSR) messages transmitted by the aircraft. By detecting these MODE-S broadcast messages and recording their arrival time, on multiple spacecraft it is possible to accurately determine the position of the aircraft, without relying on the aircrafts knowledge of its location, thus creating an independent surveillance system. It has already been established that small satellites in LEO can detect these types of signals from aircraft. Because of practical geometric limitations to the problem, it is challenging to detect aircraft in highly congested airspaces, although it is critical to maintain the overall service quality. Thus, any receiver will need to be multi-beam to segment the coverage areas into smaller region. This activity aims to design and develop the critical technologies that are needed to implement a multi-beam MODE-S Receiver suitable for small platforms while meeting the technical requirements for the RF, baseband processing and time stamping. This activity will design, manufacture and test breadboard models of the key technologies for a multi-beam MODE-S broadcast messages receiver in frequency range 950 to 1100 MHz, including the accurate timestamping of the time of arrival of individual messages. The breadboard(s) will also be used to test and evaluate the performance in the presence of multiplemessages with low Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR). Footnote: On Delegation Request activities will only be initiated on the explicit request of at least one National Delegation.