Design of the TOPEX-NFEP Utilizing the Functional Component Approach

• Main Authors: Chesney, James R., Speciale, Nicholas J., Agrawal, Anil K.
• Other Authors: NASA, Goddard Space Flight Center
• Language: en_US
• Published: International Foundation for Telemetering 1989
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10150/614728; http://arizona.openrepository.com/arizona/handle/10150/614728

International Telemetering Conference Proceedings / October 30-November 02, 1989 / Town & Country Hotel & Convention Center, San Diego, California === TOPEX/POSEIDON is a joint American/French Ocean Topography Experiment undertaken by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and Center National d'Etudes Spatiales (CNES) to acquire, process and verify altimetric sea surface height data so that mean and variable geotropic surface currents of the world's oceans can be mapped. This paper describes the functions and the architecture of the proposed front end to the Telemetry, Command and Communication System (TCCS) used for monitoring the spacecraft health, real time analysis required for supporting satellite analysis, collecting the telemetry data, and commanding the satellite. The system uses specialized hardware developed (herewith called as NFEP) at Goddard Space Flight Center to offload the Host processing and to support the data acquisition in a stand alone mode even in case of failure of the Host machine. The NFEP utilizes the semi-custom and custom very large scale integration (VLSI) devices, microprocessor control, and programmable logic designed to provide a generic NASA Communication (NASCOM) block processing and telemetry frame synchronization.