The Development Of Software For A Satellite Ground Station

• Main Author: Ng, Kian Kiong
• Format: Monograph
• Language: English
• Published: Universiti Sains Malaysia 2019
• Subjects: T Technology
• Online Access: http://eprints.usm.my/58705/1/The%20Development%20Of%20Software%20For%20A%20Satellite%20Ground%20Station.pdf; http://eprints.usm.my/58705/

MYSat (Malaysian Youth Satellite) is a CubeSat aimed to undergo the mission of measuring the electron density in the ionosphere. However, a satellite’s mission success depends on different aspects, and one of them is the satellite’s ground station. Ground station acts as the mission control of the satellite, which is responsible for enabling the communication between the satellite and the ground station personnel. A strong communication is required to allow data tracking and receiving from the satellite for data analysis purposes. With the ground station successfully fabricated, a software responsible of command uplink and downlink of data is required to be developed for the ground station to function as desired. Therefore, the purpose of this project is to develop a software acting as the ground station control which command uplink and downlink for MYSat Ground Station. The software developed is fitted with GUI (Graphical User Interface), which is meant to be user-friendly and easily accessible and understandable. Microsoft Visual Studio with C# language is used as the software developing environment to design and develop the GUI software. A simulation of the hardware connection with the computer software which includes Arduino Nano, radio telemetries and sensors, is constructed to understand, develop and verify the functionality of software viability, so that errors could be reduced when developing the finalized software of ground station while further modification could be made easily to accommodate the satellite’s mission requirement. Database design is required for the satellite’s mission, for storing the data throughout the mission period. The database allows the user to easily access the data from the mission, which is categorized based on different group such as date and time. This allows the data to be available for future references, analysis or comparison of mission data.