CONICET | Buscador de Institutos y Recursos Humanos

Beacon monitoring is an automated satellite health monitoring architecture that combines telemetry analysis, periodic low data rate message broadcasts by a spacecraft, and automated ground reception and data handling in order to implement a cost-effective anomaly detection and notification capability for spacecraft missions. Over the past two decades, this architecture has been explored and prototyped for a range of spacecraft mission classes to include use on NASA deep space probes, military spacecraft, and small satellites. This previous work has also included formalization of performance assessment metrics to capture the cost and performance of the anomaly detection and notification tasks, thereby allowing a characterization of the suitability of beacon monitoring implementations for specific missions. In this paper, we describe a newly implemented beacon architecture that has been developed and commissioned for operation in support of several NASA and university-class small spacecraft.The architecture consists of a spacecraft with a beacon transmission system, a network of four automated receive-only communications stations installed across the United States, Internet-based ground segment communications allowing centralized processing and logging of all received beacon messages, and a notification service for alerting on-call operators to anomalous conditions. We also present initial operational results for this network as applied to the NASA GeneSat-1 spacecraft, which has been operated by Santa Clara University students since its launch in December 2006. Finally, we describe future adaptations that are planned for this system given its pending use in supporting two additional NASA spacecraft due to be launched later in 2010. To the authors knowledge, this is the first example of an operational satellite beacon-based health monitoring network.

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