P21151

Since the year 2000, there have been approximately 340 CubeSat missions led by universities [1]. RIT SPEX has been working on developing their own CubeSat mission for the past 4 years, focusing on innovations in solar sail technology. Every satellite needs the means to operate and fly it and RIT does not currently have such a ground station. Last year, students began creating a ground station specifically for collecting CubeSat downlinks (~437 MHz) for a specific class.

The scope of this project is to develop upon last year’s ground station concept, LASSO (Localize Attribute SatelliteS in Orbit), capable of tracking and obtaining downlinks around the ~437 MHz band, one of the most common bands used by CubeSats. LASSO will utilize Time Difference of Arrival (TDOA) from multiple antennas to localize the source of a satellite signal, both reducing noise in data transmissions and enabling orbit determination. Orbit determination capability brings RIT one step closer to flying their own satellite. Commanding a large field of view of the sky, LASSO is able to categorize unknown signals after detection by comparing its own orbit calculation with the numerous public online catalogs. LASSO also enables new research and educational opportunities ranging from real data examples in classes for signal processing and orbital mechanics to collecting sensor data, collected from space objects.

LASSO uses TDOA for its mechanical simplicity and emphasis on software. Team members plan on utilizing open source and custom software to lower the project expenses. LASSO is the beginning of RIT’s ground station and new features are expected to be added by future MSD projects so that RIT is ready to run satellite operations when it sends its first CubeSat to space.

A summary of the project can be found in the Project Readiness Package.

[1] https://sites.google.com/a/slu.edu/swartwout/home/cubesat-database