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Completed TRL 2 (started at 2, targeting 3)
Developing Ka-band communication systems has been a goal of NASA's to utilize the wide bandwidth frequency channel and meet high data rate requirements of science missions. This proposal seeks to develop a high data rate, data encoder for a high data rate Ka-band modulator.
Space communications have traditionally been in S-band (2 GHz) and X-band (7-8 GHz) but as the demand for higher data rates from science missions increases, there has been an increased push to advance Ka-band technologies to utilize the already existing near-Earth Ka-band frequency allocation (25-27 GHz). This project investigates a coding algorithm and develops it for high data rate performance.
This project will benefit all future near-Earth missions requiring downlink bandwidths greater than 10 MHz, enabling high speed encoded data from a compact Ka-band communications transmit system.
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