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Garon, Howard

Publications and source records attributed to Garon, Howard.

Investigation into New Ground Based Communications Service Offerings in Response to SmallSat Trends

The number of NASA sponsored Small Satellite (SmallSat) missions is expected to continue to grow rapidly in the next decade and beyond. There is a growing trend towards more ambitious SmallSat missions, including formation flying (Constellation, Cluster, Trailing) SmallSats and SmallSats destined for lunar orbit and beyond. This paper will present an overview of new service offerings the NASA Near Earth Network (NEN) is currently investigating and demonstrating. It will describe the benefits that new service offerings such as Multiple Spacecraft Per Aperture (MSPA), Ground-based Phased Array (GBPA) antennas, Ground-based Aperture Arrays, and Ground-based Antenna Arraying could provide to individual or formation flying SmallSats anywhere from low-earth orbit to the Sun-Earth Lagrange point orbits. It will also present potential implementation options for future demonstrations at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) Wallops Flight Facility (WFF) as well as goals and objectives of such demonstrations.

Schaire, Scott H.

Randomizer for High Data Rates

NASA as well as a number of other space agencies now recognize that the current recommended CCSDS randomizer used for telemetry (TM) is too short. When multiple applications of the PN8 Maximal Length Sequence (MLS) are required in order to fully cover a channel access data unit (CADU), spectral problems in the form of elevated spurious discretes (spurs) appear. Originally the randomizer was called a bit transition generator (BTG) precisely because it was thought that its primary value was to insure sufficient bit transitions to allow the bit/symbol synchronizer to lock and remain locked. We, NASA, have shown that the old BTG concept is a limited view of the real value of the randomizer sequence and that the randomizer also aids in signal acquisition as well as minimizing the potential for false decoder lock. Under the guidelines we considered here there are multiple maximal length sequences under GF(2) which appear attractive in this application. Although there may be mitigating reasons why another MLS sequence could be selected, one sequence in particular possesses a combination of desired properties which offsets it from the others.

randomizer