Paper 13094-95
Overview of communications and observation strategies in the stratosphere for the Super Pressure Balloon-borne Imaging Telescope (SuperBIT)
On demand | Presented live 18 June 2024
Abstract
The Super Pressure Balloon-borne Imaging Telescope (SuperBIT) is a diffraction limited 0.5m optical-to-near-UV telescope launched from New Zealand on NASA’s Super Pressure Balloon (SPB) on April 16, 2023 and flew for 45 nights. There were several communication links used during SuperBIT’s flight to communicate with the telescope from the ground, including Starlink, the Tracking and Data Relay Satellite System (TDRSS), Pilot, and Iridium. While Starlink bandwidth was suitable for TCP-based communications and downlinking, the other links were only capable of supporting UDP-based communications. We designed a file transfer algorithm that downlinked files while detecting missing packets in our downlink and requested them automatically, saving limited bandwidth. We also developed a similar mechanism to upload files as 200-byte commands to SuperBIT. In addition to the downlink and uplink programs, we also created an “autopilot” program to automate observations based on the location, time, and a prioritized list of targets. In this paper, we discuss the communication and observation challenges that were faced and strategies we used to overcome these challenges while operating SuperBIT.
Presenter
Univ. of Toronto (Canada)
Emaad Paracha is a PhD candidate in physics at the University of Toronto and currently works with the balloon astrophysics group advised by Professor Barth Netterfield. The main focus of his PhD research has been to help build, integrate, and launch SuperBIT, a balloon-borne imaging telescope that flew on NASA's Super Pressure Balloon, and to use the data to study dark matter in galaxy clusters using weak lensing. His focus has been on flight software, helping write programs responsible for communicating and commanding the telescope, downlinking data, operating the science camera, and more.