The project team is composed by:
• Telespazio S.p.A.;
• NITEL;
• UniNa – Dipartimento di Ingegneria Elettrica e delle Tecnologie dell’Informazione (DIETI) dell’Università degli studi di Napoli Federico II (through a NITEL-DIETI consulting agreement);
The U-DRAGON project consists of a ground infrastructure for telecommunications, whose purpose is the simultaneous management of multiple nano-microsatellites, belonging to different missions and referring to different users. Its functions are:
• to provide a network of ground stations with fixed-beam and tracking capabilities, able to control a satellite (or a fleet or a constellation of satellites),
• to interface the ground network directly to the satellite owner’s Mission Control,
• to manage the satellite using a TT&C software,
• to receive telemetry streams several times a day,
• to send commands to the satellites at the earliest opportunity,
• to provide a service for different types of users, budgets and needs.
The ground stations represent the interface between the satellites and U-DRAGON, and allow the communication in the main frequency bands. Telespazio, with the support of NITEL and the consultancy of UNINA, will deal with:
― the definition of the characteristics of the Ground Stations, with fixed beam and/or with tracking capability, in conventional and innovative technology (beamforming), for the control of a wide variety of microsatellites and/or cubesats;
― the evaluation of the ground stations performance for the aforementioned types in terms of gain, capacity, latency, and the reliability of the use of COTS components;
― the creation, deploying and testing of the prototypes for both types of Station.
Start: 3rd November 2020
End: 31st October 2021
