A SCIENTIFIC SATELLITE GROUND STATION FOR AN URBAN ENVIRONMENT

摘要

A satellite ground station has been set up and is being successfully operated at the Institute for Astronomy of the University of Vienna. The location, a densely populated region of the town, has been chosen for convenience, but suffers from man made noise and intermodulation interference originating from mobile radio base station carriers. By participating in the Canadian based MOST (Microvari-ability and Oscillations of Stars) project it could be shown that a scientific ground station can be set up and operated at cost affordable for Universities. The station has been built using off-the-shelf semi-professional equipment. The MOST satellite is in a polar sun synchronous orbit at a height of around 830km. During overpass typically lasting 15 minutes the satellite has to be tracked by a 3 m dish with 0.5° precision, which is a challenging task. Since October 2003, reliable data download from the MOST satellite is performed with the Vienna ground station contributing nearly half of the data traffic.