In order to apply for any of the following theses or internships, the candidate must have no more than 3 exams left.
At present, the orbit determination of deep space missions relies mainly on Earth-based radiometric measurements, namely ranging, Doppler, and DDOR. These are derived from the properties of the radio link between the spacecraft and one or more ground stations on the Earth. The main sources of noise affecting the radio link are: interplanetary plasma, Earth’s troposphere and ionosphere, thermal noise in the electronics.
The objective of this project is to develop a Python tool to quickly evaluate the quality of the radiometric measurements acquired at the ground stations, without the need of a detailed orbit determination analysis. The candidate will have to retrieve and load all the relevant inputs, including: radiometric measurements, meteorological data, station configuration, spacecraft telemetry. Then, the most important parameters affecting the link quality will be computed and displayed. An automatic test report will be generated.
During Solar Conjunctions, i.e. when the Sun is between the Earth and the S/C, radiofrequency TT&C links can be severely degraded. Having the Sun-Earth-Probe (SEP) angle lower than 3°, introduces deep fading events that can affect several consecutive codeword of the same signal, making communications with the S/C impossible. For this reason, it is important to increase the channel diversity (the number of independent fading levels experienced by each codeword of a transmitted signal). The objective of this project is to use interleaving techniques to increase the channel diversity and see if this can bring any improvement in the signal decoding. The candidate will work with some of the main modulations and coding techniques currently used in Deep Space Missions and test new ones. Everything will be performed using a software developed in MATLAB that is able to simulate a complete link from ground to spacecraft (and back) with the presence of the solar environment.
Uploaded: 2 Mar 2022/AZ
Code: LT22RFTTSC