Research Summaries

Back SMDC Ground Station Support

Fiscal Year 2019
Division Graduate School of Engineering & Applied Science
Department Space Systems Academic Group
Investigator(s) Minelli, Giovanni
Newman, James H.
Sponsor Department of Defense Space (DoD)
Summary This proposal describes the effort for supporting the U.S. Army’s Space Missile Defense Command (SMDC) development and commissioning of multiple small satellite ground stations. This supports DoD Space efforts in the emerging field of very small satellites. This effort also supports the Mobile CubeSat Command and Control (MC3) ground station network. With the advent of CubeSats and other very small satellites, the number of active satellites is growing. Even swarms of SmallSats/CubeSats are being considered. This ground station research deals with the basic development of distributed ground stations and begins to deal with the “many satellites, few ground stations” optimization problem. The growing acceptance of the SmallSat/CubeSat, a very small satellite, as a means of accomplishing focused research objectives of national interest makes this project of great interest to the Space Systems Academic Group at NPS. The Naval Officers and other students in the NPS Space Systems Engineering and Operations curricula have the opportunity to participate in Directed Studies and Thesis research related to this proposal. The Space Systems curricula benefit from the opportunity to integrate laboratories which use active satellites in orbit and an active network of ground stations. In addition, this work supports the development of national capabilities in space to ultimately benefit the Naval Service and the warfighter.
Keywords CubeSats MC3 ground stations
Publications Publications, theses (not shown) and data repositories will be added to the portal record when information is available in FAIRS and brought back to the portal
Data Publications, theses (not shown) and data repositories will be added to the portal record when information is available in FAIRS and brought back to the portal