[Signal Processing Suite Design]

Abstract

Our role in this project was to participate in the design of the signal processing suite to analyze plasma density measurements on board a small constellation (3 or 4) satellites in Low Earth Orbit. As we are new to space craft experiments, one of the challenges was to simply gain understanding of the quantity of data which would flow from the satellites, and possibly to interact with the design teams in generating optimal sampling patterns. For example, as the fleet of satellites were intended to fly through the same volume of space (displaced slightly in time and space), the bulk plasma structure should be common among the spacecraft. Therefore, an optimal, limited bandwidth data downlink would take advantage of this commonality. Also, motivated by techniques in ionospheric radar, we hoped to investigate the possibility of employing aperiodic sampling in order to gain access to a wider spatial spectrum without suffering aliasing in k-space.