Tech Track Papers
Tech Track Papers Archive
Much as aircraft are affected by the prevailing winds and weather conditions in which they fly, satellites are affected by the variability in density and motion of the near earth space environment. Drastic changes in the state of the upper atmosphere, caused by geomagnetic storms or other phenomena, result in perturbations of LEO satellite motions…
Read MoreSpace has become a contested warfighting domain and it is imperative that the Air Force has the ability to provide Space Situational Awareness (SSA) to operational commanders. Due to the complexity of holding custody of space vehicles of interest with a single sensor, and due to limitations in coverages areas, sensors in the Space Surveillance…
Read MoreNASA, and other U.S. government space civil agencies, have long been a great supporter of Cubesat activities, especially within academic and emerging space communities. Over the past several years, these civil space agencies and organizations have provided funding for emerging space projects and also access to space. The result of this support is civil space…
Read MoreThe satellite ground segment has become reliant on hypervisor-based virtual machines (VMs). Things that took days, weeks or even longer using the previous bare-metal approach are now being accomplished in minutes or less. As good as virtual machines are can container-based virtualization technology provide additional benefits to hypervisor-based virtualization? In a container-based virtualization environment the…
Read MoreThe infrastructure that supports today’s ground systems are complex and cumbersome to maintain. In addition each system has unique characteristics, requirements, technical implementations and operational concepts. In the era of shrinking budgets and focused reduction of attack footprint, there is an increasing need for flexible and converged solutions for ground systems architectures. Today the coin…
Read MoreBall Aerospace COSMOS is a free and readily available open source command and control system for operations and test that brings a set of functionality to the aerospace community that has previously only been available in proprietary and expensive COTS solutions. Open source software like COSMOS fills a very specific need for SmallSat/CubeSat missions where…
Read MoreFor decades, the gateway to space has been through the Eastern and Western Launch Ranges (E/WRs). The collaboration of the governing agencies, FAA, USAF, and NASA provides a commercial alternative to past practice with greater reliance on telemetry and automation. The need for mission assurance and public safety in all phases of flight, on-orbit operations,…
Read MoreThe National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is conducting an analysis to plan its future operational environmental satellite architecture. This is an opportunity to design a more agile space architecture, which NOAA defines as a set of instruments, their allocation to orbital platforms assigned to specific orbits, and a set of rules by which the…
Read MoreXEUS, the eXperimental Enhanced Upper Stage, fulfills a need for an affordable, large commercial lunar lander vital to creating a cis-lunar economy and developing recurring activities beyond LEO. XEUS enhances ACES with a mission kit to enable the stage to reach destinations beyond LEO and function as a lander upon arrival. Several elements of the…
Read MoreThe Tropospheric Emissions, Monitoring of Pollution (TEMPO) program was selected by NASA for the Earth Venture Instruments 2012 Announcement of Opportunity. TEMPO is an innovative use of a well-proven remote sensing technique for air quality measurements and Ball Aerospace is the instrument developer. Low Earth Orbit (LEO) remote sensing techniques have made measurements of photochemical…
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