Technology: navigation and space

The evolution of space systems whether for experiment or communication applications has been toward the creation of a reconfigurable and programmable platform that could leverage the initial investment costs of the satellite, by providing the flexibility that renders the satellite more useful and up-to-date with respect to the latest advances in the sciences. This flexibility allows for intelligent management of the payload and ground station with potentially multiple uses throughout the life of the satellite. An important component of the space system is its transceiver which is responsible for all the communication functions between the satellite and the earth station.

The key design guidelines that drive the future developments of the communication payloads and ground stations are:

 use of highly portable standard language ANSI C++ (instead of ADA) as the core programming language used for the implementation of the transceiver functions in software,

 totally open source operating system architecture based on the use of real-time Linux,

 reliable and secure source code development based on industry standard practices and Concurrent Versioning System (CVS) policies and procedures,

 a modular development based on a library of blocks (STAR) that can be arranged in a variety of ways in order to implement just about any kind of communication link, smart antenna functions and multiple access strategy,

 user friendly interface for software development,

 well tuned architecture and partition of the transceiver between programmable hardware entities (such as FPGAs, Parametrized ASICs and DSPs) and general purpose computers (such as workstations) with the goal of providing a well balanced system between basic requirements of speed, reliability and security, fault tolerance, and flexibility.

Euroconcepts, has responded to this shift by providing the software tools that power the future satellite systems and are totally compliant with the about requisites.