RECONFIGURABLE GATEWAY SYSTEMS FOR SPACE DATA NETWORKING

Abstract

Over a dozen commercial remote sensing programs are currently under development representing billions of dollars of potential investment. While technological advances have dramatically decreased the cost of building and launching these satellites, the cost and complexity of accessing their data for commercial use are still prohibitively high. This paper describes Reconfigurable Gateway Systems which provide, to a broad spectrum of existing and new data users, affordable telemetry data acquisition, processing and distribution for real-time remotely sensed data at rates up to 300 Mbps. These Gateway Systems are based upon reconfigurable computing, multiprocessing, and process automation technologies to meet a broad range of satellite communications and data processing applications. Their flexible architecture easily accommodates future enhancements for decompression, decryption, digital signal processing and image / SAR data processing.