Engineering topics

Kathleen Michelle Riesing

Publications and source records attributed to Kathleen Michelle Riesing.

3 records

NASA NTRSDate not supplied

On-Orbit Results of Pointing, Acquisition, and Tracking for the TBIRD CubeSat Mission

NASA’s TeraByte Infrared Delivery (TBIRD) program launched in May 2022 and successfully demonstrated high-rate laser communications from low-Earth orbit to ground. The laser communications payload provides pointing feedback to the host spacecraft to precisely track the ground station through the 5-minute pass. This paper presents the on-orbit results of the pointing system for TBIRD, including initial acquisition and closed-loop performance within about 30 urad RMS per axis.

Lasercom↗

NASA NTRSDate not supplied

Recent on-Orbit Results and Arq Performance Analysis for the Tbird 200-Gbps Mission

The TeraByte Infrared Delivery (TBIRD) mission has successfully demonstrated 200-Gbps laser communication downlinks from a 6U CubeSat in low-Earth orbit (LEO) and has delivered up to 4.8 terabytes (TB) error-free in a 5-minute pass. In total 65 passes have been performed since launch in May 2022, with 25 of those passes conducted in April-May 2023. The TBIRD space and ground terminals leverage commercial fiber-coupled coherent transceivers along with a custom Automatic Repeat reQuest (ARQ) protocol to ensure error-free communication through the atmospheric fading channel. This paper presents data throughput results from the on-orbit passes and an analysis of the ARQ system operation that shows that near-optimal performance was achieved. We also present results from Doppler compensation experiments that led to an increase in the data volume transferred per pass.

Tbird↗

NASA NTRSDate not supplied

Update on Tbird on-Orbit Experiments and Performance Results

The TeraByte Infrared Delivery (TBIRD) mission has successfully demonstrated 200-Gbps laser communication downlinks from a 6U CubeSat in low-Earth orbit (LEO), delivering up to 4.8 terabytes (TB) error-free in a 5-minute pass. In total 65 passes were performed from May 2022 through May 2023. This paper presents an overview of the results of two experimental campaigns during that year of operations.

TBIRD↗