Ground Station Munich
The team is composed of three PhD candidates, five MSc and two BSc students of the University of Technology in Munich. They are setting up, maintaining, and operating the ground station that will receive the generated data of all ESEO experiments.
Providing ground station services for the reception of ESEO scientific data down-link in S-Band
The Munich ground station is the primary payload ground station for the ESEO mission. In nominal operation, all scientific data generated on the satellite (e.g. images, measurements) are sent from the satellite to this ground station. During the passes of the satellite, its position will be computed based on an estimated orbit, and it will be continuously tracked by the ground station antenna. The signals received will need to be amplified and processed in order to be able to extract the payload data from the signal. This extracted data will have to be checked for consistency, and any errors will have to be corrected or at least detected before the data is forwarded to the scientific teams.
The Munich ground station consists of a 3m mesh reflector antenna that is mounted on a former industrial robot placed on the roof of the institute. The received signals are collected with a USRP software-defined radio, and further signal processing is performed on a PC. The control circuits and software needed to power the robot’s engines, as well as the orbit propagation and the receiver software, is developed by the students. This allows the participating students to gain experience in a wide variety of engineering skills, from circuit design, soldering and PCB manufacturing, control theory, signal processing, communication protocols, system engineering and project management.
Contact:
Martin Luelf
martin.luelf @ tum.de
