TEKEVER SPΔCE Promotes GAMALINK Kick-Off Meeting

TEKEVER SPΔCE welcomed the GAMALINK partners to the Project's Kick-Off Meeting at its Lisbon facilities. The meeting was extremely productive to disseminate several key aspects for the success of GAMALINK and to guide the work to be developed in the following months. 

TEKEVER SPΔCE is the Portuguese leader in Space research and the FP7 Space research project GAMALINK will develop an Inter Satellite Link (ISL) based on Software-Defined Radio (SDR) technology, capable of supporting mobile ad hoc networking, global positioning system and attitude determination for small (nano and pico) satellite platforms. 

GAMALINK or Generic SDR-based Multifunctional space Link will then implement a set of different techniques, including mobile ad hoc networking, an enabler for ISLs, attitude determination of one station relative to another through the measurement of carrier phase delays between signals transmitted from multiple antennas, GPS waveform reading and signal decoding and ranging between different satellites, based solely on the transmission of radio signals. GAMALINK will also focus on innovative antenna, RF front-end design and beam forming techniques. The Project's major breakthrough is the offer of an integrated solution for communications, attitude and orbit control purposes, targeting the increasingly popular small satellite market.

GAMALINK is a 2-year Project, with an overall budget of about 2 millions euros for the 6 participating institutions of Portugal, Germany, Spain and Turkey, that will ultimately prove the applicability of a wide range of technologies in Space, in an attempt to leverage their technology maturity levels.

TEKEVER SPΔCE at the QB50 Workshop

TEKEVER SPΔCE attended the QB50 Workshop held at the von Karman Institute for Fluid Dynamics (VKI) premises in Brussels, where updates on the evolution of the QB50 Initiative and the status of the QB50 Launch were presented.

An EU FP7-funded project, QB50 (https://www.qb50.eu) has the scientific objective to study in situ the temporal and spatial variations of a number of key constituents and parameters in the lower thermosphere (90-320 km) with a network of 40 double CubeSats (miniaturised satellites), separated by a few hundred kilometres and carrying identical sensors. QB50 will also study the re-entry process by measuring a number of key parameters during re-entry and by comparing predicted and actual CubeSat trajectories and orbital lifetimes. QB50 will also accommodate about 10 double or triple CubeSats for In-Orbit Demonstration (IOD) of technologies and miniaturised science sensors and the Gossamer-1 solar sail technology demonstration package. 

At the QB50 Workshop, TEKEVER SPΔCE hosted a splinter session on the ambitious GAMANET endeavour, aiming to create the largest ad hoc communications network ever in Space, providing the networking capability to satellite constellations. This session generated a great deal of interest from workshop participants and instructive discussions took place concerning the next steps of this revolutionary initiative in space communications. TEKEVER SPΔCE's GAMANET proposition will join CubeSats and ground stations in a seamless communications network that will be instrumental to validate innovative communication technologies in space and to improve the overall QB50 communications and scientific results.