Newman, James H.

This proposal describes the effort associated with the continued infrastructure research emphasizing CubeSat ground station systems. This supports DoD Space efforts in the emerging field of very small satellites. Infrastructure research is applied research and requires actual hardware and software at NPS and in the field for test and experiment. Specifically, this research and development effort includes the Mobile CubeSat Command and Control (MC3) ground station network. With the advent of CubeSats and other very small satellites, the number of active satellites is growing. Even swarms of CubeSats are being considered. This ground station research deals with the basic development of distributed ground stations and begins to deal with the “many satellites, few ground stations” optimization problem. The growing acceptance of the CubeSat, a very small satellite, as a means of accomplishing focused research objectives of national interest makes this project of great interest to the Space Systems Academic Group at NPS. The Naval Officers and other students in the NPS Space Systems Engineering and Operations curricula have the opportunity to participate in Directed Studies and Thesis research related to this proposal. The Space Systems curricula benefit from the opportunity to integrate laboratories which use active satellites in orbit and an active network of ground stations. In addition, this work supports the development of national capabilities in space to ultimately benefit the Naval Service and the warfighter.
Space Systems Academic Group
Department of Defense Space
DoD
2017