Team members:
- Phillip Crosby
- Brian French
- Danny Gale
- David Harrison
- Max Perez
We aim to design an RF-recieving module that will collect atmosphereic ice and water data to be used by scientists studying climate change. This module will interface with a power system and transmitter to be implemented on a CubeSAT satellite. The satellite will likely be orbiting above the earth in a geosynchronous orbit.
The frequency of the electro-magnetic waves that we will observe is on the order of 118 GHz, which will pose some unique design challenges. The incoming radiation will be captured using an RF horn, as opposed to a traditional antenna. The waves will then be directed through waveguides to an analog mixer which will decrease the frequency content of the incoming waves to something closer to 20 GHz for ease of processing, and then passed through to an A/D converter. The quantized samples will then be multiplexed into an array of digital filters in order to examine in which bands the spectral energy density lies.
The data will be passed into a microprocessor and we will develop a SPI bus interface so that the data can be sent back to Earth via the transmitter that is also located within the payload.