Description
Objective: The objective of the activity is to design and develop a physical layer simulator in order to assess the communication needs, and develop a system concept to support air/space traffic management considering emerging transport means such as hypersonic space planes. Targeted Improvements: Enabling communications for a future European Air/Space Traffic Management System in support of hypersonic space planes. Performance improvement with respect to currently available communication systems, up to 1 Mbit/s throughput. Description: Envisaged Air Traffic Management future satellite systems are currently being developed, hopefully leading to more secure and resilient airspace usage. Meanwhile there is an increased number of projects targeting hypersonic space planes, that couldfly at Mach 25 and altitudes higher than 100 Km, piloted locally or remotely, for transportation of freight and people between different points on Earth. Due to their specific characteristics and high speed, those are not covered by the foreseen systems to be deployed. It has been suggested by the European Commission that it is necessary to regulate low earth orbit air space and that Space Traffic Management is an EU flagship project. Starting from the current capabilities of satellite communication systems for Air Traffic Management and of links for Launch Vehicles Telemetry acquisition, this activity aims to design and develop a system concept to address the issues (e.g. security, air interface, performance requirements), possible solutions (e.g. advanced antennas technologies) and systems for improving the performance of current systems for satellite-based Air Traffic Management, so that they can support hypersonic space planes, even remotely piloted. A realistic physical layer and system level simulator will be developed to perform thetesting of the developed solution with a representative scenario.