Rain Attenuation at Low Earth Orbiting Satellite Ground Station

Abstract

The project "MOST" (micro variability and oscillations of stars) is a Canadian micro satellite space telescope mission. The micro satellite carries a Rumak-Maksutov telescope with an aperture of 15 cm. The size of the satellite is 65 cmtimes65 cmtimes30 cm and the mass is about 65 kg. The goals of the mission are to analyze the inner structure of stars, set a lower limit to the age of the universe and to search for Exoplanets. The project MOST consists of a low Earth orbiting (LEO) satellite and three ground stations, one of them in Vienna. The Vienna ground station system was set up at the Institute for Astronomy of the University of Vienna in cooperation with the Institute of Communications and Radio-Frequency Engineering of the Vienna University of Technology. During the link budget calculations atmospheric attenuation had to be considered. The satellite link operates in 2 GHz band. In this band the ionospheric effects are negligible. This paper presents the methodology applied for rain attenuation calculations