MISSION OVERVIEW

Ground stations remain a critical infrastructural component of modern satellite systems providing critical backhaul for telecommunications, earth observation and defense systems.

Over the course of two months, we challenged ourselves to implement a simplified ground station, focusing exclusively on the receive downlink segment. We intend to initially receive from the GEO GOES-19 weather satellite. Such an endevor will require the following:

• A Custom L-Band Low-Noise Blockdownconverter
• A One Meter Parabolic Dish Reflector
• A Gimbal Drive System for Dynamic Pointing & Tracking
• A Software Decoder to transform the Recieved Signal into Images
• A Software Controls Stack to Point and Track Satellites of All Orbits from One Platform

STATUS

At the time of the final demonstration, the system successfully acquired and received data from the GOES-19 weather satellite. Future iterations may extend this design to better support low Earth orbit (LEO) satellites and additional frequency bands.