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The radio frequency band that many NASA missions use to communicate with spacecraft — S-band — is getting a bit crowded and noisy, and likely to get more [congested] as science missions demand higher and higher data rates.
A team of NASA technologists at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, just may have a solution, particularly for potential missions that plan to operate in low-Earth orbit and have limited real estate to accommodate communications gear.
Under two different research and development projects, technologists Mae Huang and Victor Marrero-Fontanez have collaborated to test and verify components of a prototype end-to-end Ka-band space communications system, which promises significantly higher data rates — a whopping 2.4 gigabits of data per second (Gbps) — over more traditional S-band systems, which theoretically could achieve data rates of 90 megabits of data per second (Mbps).
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2015-02/nsfc-ntd021715.php
(Score: 2) by frojack on Friday February 20 2015, @02:07AM
They already use K band for several missions, as the story mentions. Its not totally new.
I read it as developing radios for rovers and orbiters to communicate back to earth.
Its not clear they were going to use it as down links. (Although they could on most days since NASA has a pretty wide choice of ground station to choose from.) The TDRS-L [wikipedia.org] sat launched last year already has K band capability as did TDRS-11 before it.
They would have the luxury of band shifting down to S multiple band transmitters for the downlinks.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.