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Completed TRL 6 (started at 6, targeting 6)
The astrophysics and heliophysics community is entering an new era of time domain astronomy that is multiwavelength (spanning the full electromagnetic spectrum) and multimessenger (including photons, neutrinos, and gravitational waves). The time domain nature of these studies requires rapid notifications to and from space-based instruments to alert the community of events and to respond to alerts from other observatories and missions. CubeSat missions are being built and planned which require the on-demand, low-latency communications that TDRS provides and this proposal develops a such as system.
This technology maturation task will provide a TDRS compatible communications solution via the Vulcan commercial radio to enable cubesat communications. We will procure an end-to-end CubeSat TDRS test bench based on an engineering unit of the Vulcan NSR-SDR-S/S-USN (hereafter Vulcan). Vulcan is a TDRS and NEN compatible radio which can be used as a drop-in Space Network/Near Earth Network (SN/NEN) communications solution for CubeSats once it has been integrated into a SmallSat FlatSat and the TDRS compatibility verified.
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