State-of-the-Art Space Mission Telecommand Receivers

This paper is the result of a study promoted by the European Space Agency, aimed at research, design, development, and demonstration of a state-of-the-art receiver chain for telecommand (TC) links in space missions. The introduction of new, very powerful low-density parity-check codes for error correction, recently approved for the TC standard, allows to operate at significantly lower signal-to-noise ratios. This implies a number of challenges for the receivers in terms of frame synchronization, carrier acquisition, and tracking loops. Both the decoding and the receiver algorithms must be optimized as well, in view of permitting efficient hardware and software implementation, while ensuring excellent error rate performances. All these issues are faced in the present study through a fruitful co-operation between industry, research centers and universities. This paper presents a survey of the main results achieved, covering receiver enhancement investigation, simulation, implementation and breadboard description.