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Completed TRL 3 (started at 2, targeting 3)
As NASA and its international partners shift their focus on manned missions back to the Moon, it is expected that a lunar network will come into fruition with the demand drastically increasing on high data rates for communications as well as precise real-time spacecraft position determination for navigation. GMSK+PN is the current state-of-the-art technique for simultaneous telemetry and ranging, and has become a CCSDS standard in the recent years due to its advantage in being both bandwidth and power efficient making it very suitable for cislunar communications. However, GMSK is inherently a binary signaling scheme and therefore limits the maximum allowable data rates for the given RF spectrum. The goal of this project is to perform a feasibility study on the simultaneous transmissions of higher order modulated (HOM) telemetry signal with PN ranging.
The anticipated benefit is that with this transmission scheme of simultaneous HOM with PN ranging, if proven feasible, will allow for higher telemetry throughput, i.e., 50% increase for 8PSK, 100% increase for 16APSK, etc. over GMSK, while achieving ranging requirements on our Lunar missions.
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