E. Doensdorf-Sternal, T. Marynowski, K. Saucke, P. Martín Pimentel, F. Heine, K. Müller, F. Mrowka

The Technology Demonstration Payload No.1 (TDP1) on board the geostationary communication satellite Alphasat I-XL is successfully in operation since 2014. It consists of a Laser Communication terminal (TDP1-LCT) and a Ka-band payload. The TDP1-LCT regularly performs Satellite-to-Ground-Links (SGLs) with various optical ground stations, e.g. with the Transportable Adaptive Optical Ground Station (TAOGS, currently located on Tenerife, Spain) and the OGS-OP from the Institut für Kommunikation und Navigation (IKN, located in Oberpfaffenhofen, Germany). Different restrictions and challenges are to be taken into account, especially when executing optical links through the Earth atmosphere. One major challenge is the weather conditions, which may lead to a considerable link outage depending on the location of the optical ground station. The link planning for the TPD1-LCT is done by the TDP1 Mission Control Center (MCC) at the German Space Operations Center (GSOC) and it is currently based on a weekly planning cycle. In practice, this means that the decision to which optical ground station an optical link is planned to has to be made at least one week in advance. Weather conditions, on the other hand, may change within hours and the longer the forecast time is, the more inaccurate the forecast gets, especially regarding the aspect of cloud coverage. Thus, the system in place is not agile enough to respond to such short term changes. The current planning system has been originally designed to enable a demonstration, for which the requirements were conservative from todays perspective. The demonstration of the system and the weekly planning cycle was successful and the following ongoing performance surpassed expectations resulting in multiple extensions of the TDP1 Program. To cope with the requirements for increased agility this contribution shows how fast re-planning of Satellite-to-Ground-Links (SGLs) can be realized, in order to support site diversity taking into account weather conditions.

Deutscher Luft- und Raumfahrtkongress 2023, Stuttgart

Deutsche Gesellschaft für Luft- und Raumfahrt - Lilienthal-Oberth e.V., Bonn, 2023

Conference Paper

englisch

21,0 x 29,7 cm, 6 Seiten

urn:nbn:de:101:1-2023112212280093499546

10.25967/610169

Laser communication terminal, optical link planning, Mission planning, site diversity, optical Satellite-to-Ground communication, Generic Link Planning System, Reactive Planning

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Doensdorf-Sternal, E.; Marynowski, T.; et al. (2023): Agile Optical Satellite-to-Ground-Link Operation with the current TDP1 Optical Link Planning System. Deutsche Gesellschaft für Luft- und Raumfahrt - Lilienthal-Oberth e.V.. (Text). https://doi.org/10.25967/610169. urn:nbn:de:101:1-2023112212280093499546.

22.11.2023