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The Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (JHU/APL) Frontier Radio (JHU/APL FR), as flown on the Van Allen Probes and Parker Solar Probe missions, is a deep space communications platform designed to minimize size, weight, and power (SWaP) while maximizing radiation tolerance. This platform has historically only been used to support Deep Space Network communications and modulation formats. The receive chain was designed to support subcarrier PCM/PM waveforms and only forward demodulated symbols and uplink packets over to avionics. For the Europa Clipper mission, there was a desire to be able to record arbitrary segments of spectrum for post-processing on the ground, due to the real-time processing limitations of the low-SWaP JHU/APL FR. Therefore, a open-loop recording feature was added to the JHU/APL FR. The feature requirements dictated minimal firmware development, no additional hardware, and a packet stream to avionics using the existing spacewire interface. The open-loop record feature has differing bandwidths, ranging from the highest supported by spacewire to an eighth of that rate in order to capture as much data as possible or to reduce data volumes. The user can steer the center frequency of the recording window in order to capture a certain slice of spectrum. A simple post-processing algorithm was developed to fix a slight temporal shift during the recording data signal chain. An overview of the firmware design, algorithms, post-processing procedure, and analysis of the results are described below.

Persephone is a NASA concept mission study that addresses key questions raised by New Horizons’ encounters with Kuiper Belt objects (KBOs), with arguably the most important being, “Does Pluto have a subsurface ocean?” More broadly, Persephone would answer four significant science questions: (1) What are the internal structures of Pluto and Charon? (2) How have the surfaces and atmospheres in the Pluto system evolved? (3) How has the KBO population evolved? (4) What are the particles and magnetic field environments of the Kuiper Belt? To answer these questions, Persephone has a comprehensive payload, and it would both orbit within the Pluto system and encounter other KBOs. The nominal mission is 30.7 yr long, with launch in 2031 on a Space Launch System Block 2 rocket with a Centaur kick stage, followed by a 27.6 yr cruise powered by existing radioisotope electric propulsion and a Jupiter gravity assist to reach Pluto in 2058. En route to Pluto, Persephone would have one 50–100 km class KBO encounter before starting a 3.1-Earth-year orbital campaign of the Pluto system. The mission also includes the potential for an 8 yr extended mission, which would enable the exploration of another KBO in the 100–150 km size class. The mission payload includes 11 instruments: Panchromatic and Color High-Resolution Imager, Low-Light Camera, Ultra-Violet Spectrometer, Near-Infrared (IR) Spectrometer, Thermal IR Camera, Radio Frequency Spectrometer, Mass Spectrometer, Altimeter, Sounding Radar, Magnetometer, and Plasma Spectrometer. The nominal cost of this mission is $3.0 billion, making it a large strategic science mission.

In deep space communications, carrier acquisition is pivotal for demodulation of weak signals. Traditionally, NASA's Deep Space Network will sweep the uplink carrier to ensure that the receiver has acquired carrier lock before sending data. In a deep space relay link, the carrier acquisition process will be performed by one of the transponders. Using the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (JHU/APL) Frontier Radio Software Defined Radio architecture, the swept behavior required for unaided carrier acquisition was migrated to the radio's receiver through updates to the algorithms that perform carrier acquisition and tracking. A notional relay link between the NASA Europa Lander spacecraft and the Europa Clipper and Carrier Relay Spacecraft (CRS) is used as a case study for the technique. The nominal center frequency of the carrier acquisition phase-locked loop (PLL) is able to sweep at a user-defined rate within user-defined frequency bounds to ensure that the receiver can lock onto a carrier without the transmitted carrier sweeping through the receivers quiescent frequency. Carrier loop sweeping continues until lock is detected and the loop is switched to a tracking design. The technique that enabled receiver loop sweeping also allows the receiver to accept a Doppler prediction frequency to offset the quiescent frequency of the loop. The turn-around ratio is maintained through the acquisition process, as well as with Doppler prediction offset and tracking. As a result of implementing self-sweeping in the radio receiver, an offset can accumulate in the PLL filter state as the tracking design is nearly Type-II. Furthermore, this offset may compound with repeated acquisitions. The resulting filter state can cause an unwanted offset in the acquisition frequency of the loop. Since the internal state of the loop filter is not directly accessible in the Frontier Radio architecture, this state must be bled-off by temporarily altering the design of the second-order PLL to one with very short time constants. This bleed-off loop is applied at the beginning of each acquisition sequence for a short period of time, then the nominal loop parameters are reapplied before sweeping commences. Algorithms and analysis of the techniques are described below.