Advanced data chain technologies are crucial for future satellite systems dedicated to environmental and biodiversity monitoring, agriculture, climate research, providing safe and secure communication infrastructures in remote areas, and to the management of emergency scenarios. Multispectral and hyperspectral imaging is recognised as a key enabling technology for several space borne and airborne remote sensing applications such as precision agriculture, environmental monitoring, surveillance, security and more. A key element for both natural and man-made disasters is the monitoring of events and their impacts by high resolution EO satellite missions, which requires gathering this data with the lowest latency.
The European and world-wide trend is to mature application-oriented technologies in the domains of Earth observation (EO), satellite navigation and satellite communications, which are facing a steady increase of performance. These growing mission requirements need an answer at system and equipment level by further miniaturisation, integration and break-through of data handling technologies. The Hi-SIDE project aimed to assist in this mission by developing a suite of integrated technologies for the high-speed management, processing, and transfer of large amounts satellite data, such as the data collected by Earth Observation satellites.
The specific objectives of Hi-SIDE were to design new high speed data management systems including on-board payload data-processing technology, on-board high-speed data storage, adaptive, reconfigurable, multi-Gbit/s inter-spacecraft data transfer and downlink systems, on-board data compression systems and adaptive data reduction techniques and a high-performance on-board network technology, and to integrate and demonstrate these systems in an end to end data chain supporting an input data-rate from instruments of 50 Gbps and an output data-rate to the downlink of 10 Gbit/s.
The project made substantial advances in the performance of individual components of the data chain, including the development of: a high-performance, high-reliability and high-availability network to interconnect the data chain elements, a modular data compression system which can process the very high instrument data rates foreseen for future EO missions, a high performance very versatile payload processing unit that can be programmed on the fly, in 40us; a high-rate RF downlink transmitter is used for high speed data transmission from earth observation or data relay satellites to the ground and an optical terminal system that supports high speed data links and optical downlinks.
Whilst these individual advances represent significant improvements to current satellite payload technologies, Hi-SIDEs main innovation is the delivery of a complete data chain architecture to handle an aggregate instrument data-rate of at least 50 Gbps in the near term, together with a roadmap to achieve even higher performance in the future.
