Tiny Open-Loop Atmospheric Sensing Technique, Year 1

We will design and fabricate a circuit card capable of retrieving real-time ionospheric and atmospheric refractivity from a low Earth orbit platform. The design must use less than 3 Watts orbit average power and process GPS signals as they rise through the lower troposphere. These data must be accompanied by post-processed orbit data with errors less than 2mm/sec velocity and 20 cm positioning. This design will form the basis of a cube-sat sized 3 Watt radio occultation sensor for LMR-sat. The TOAST instrument is an open-loop processor of GPS navigation signals. The electronics fits on a single 10 cm square card with RF components and digital components on opposite sides. A dime-sized programmable chip (FPGA) acts as a signal processor for the GPS signals of up to 10 satellites. This FPGA is under the control of a very low-power Linux CPU which handles all of the tracking models for very weak GPS signals transecting the atmosphere. Unlike typical GPS receivers, TOAST tracks without tight phase-locked loop tracking of the received carrier phase. For any given GPS satellite to be observed, TOAST generates a precise 3rd order range and phase model and only updates the FPGA every 1 - 10 seconds. This allows the processor to be loosely coupled with the signal processing to the point where, given sufficient ground to space bandwidth, TOAST can be controlled by a ground-based CPU. However, in this implementation, a Linux CPU will accompany the RF and FPGA logic to provide real-time data.

High-precision orbit determination, ionospheric profiling and atmospheric profiling from very small, satellites such as cube-sats. By deploying the low-power, low-cost sensors on a commercial constellation such as Iridium-NExT, a continuous, global, synoptic view of the Earth's troposphere and ionosphere can be obtained. These observations have very low latency, merely seconds old, allowing rapid assessments of significant space weather events and giving weather centers hundreds of globally distributed refractivity profiles every hour.A low-cost, low power and highly accurate RO instruments provides many more opportunties

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