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ɸ-sat missions: Achievements and plan for the future: “Federated Satellite System Experiment: Design and Results of the Stratospheric Balloon Campaign and the FSSCat mission
12 October 2021 - 8:45 // 12:00
By Joan Adrià Ruiz-de-Azúa, Director of Space Communications Research Group at i2CAT.
In the last years, the need to access Earth Observation high spatial resolution data with very low latency, ideally in near-real-time, has increased. Distributed Satellite Systems have emerged as an effective and efficient architecture to deal with these tight requirements. One of these systems is the Federated Satellite Systems which explore the benefits of sharing unused and available resources between satellites, such as memory storage or downlink opportunities. This interaction is known as satellite federations. Additional downlink contacts may enable low-latency communications and increase the downlink capacity. Therefore, the deployment of federations would allow satisfying current Earth Observation community demands. This work contributes to establish this promising paradigm by presenting a proof-of-concept of a federated system, called FSS Experiment payload. This payload is boarded into three stratospheric balloons, and it provides them communications means to create federations. The design of the payload, and the flight campaign results are presented in this work.
