BRITE-AUSTRIA GROUND SEGMENT AND DISTRIBUTED OPERATIONS CONCEPT

摘要

BRITE-Austria is the first Austrian satellite and part of the Bright Target Explorer (BRITE) mission, a constellationof nanosatellites observing the brightness oscillations of massive luminous stars by differential photometry. Upto now, six satellites (two Austrian, two Polish, and two Canadian) are part of the constellation.To operate the constellation, a network of ground stations has been established, including ground stations in Austria(Graz and Vienna), Canada (Toronto), and Poland (Warsaw). The operations concept for the mission foresees theuse of a master station for each satellite, which serves as mission control centre and acts as master station for thespacecraft, while the other stations are configured as relay stations.This paper presents the ground station configuration of the BRITE-Austria master station located at Graz Universityof Technology, showing a cost-effective approach of establishing a small satellite ground station. Subsequently,the operational concept for the mission with the established ground station network is described. Since all BRITEground stations are configured in a similar manner and make use of the same standards, they are fully compatiblewith each other. Therefore, each station can take over control of a spacecraft if required, increasing availability andintroducing redundancy. Furthermore, the standardization allows to use the ground station also for compatible upcomingmissions, which helps mitigating costs in case of mission extensions by serving other missions in parallel.The ground station network makes use of automation by supporting remote access, maintenance, and operations.Operations run autonomously by predefined scheduled commands, which are uploaded to the spacecraft during aparticular pass. In addition, automated software validates the received satellite telemetry, generates alarms in case ofunexpected behaviour, and notifies the operators by email and text message.