Scintillation Effects on Deep Space Telecommunication Links through Solar Corona

When radio waves pass through the solar corona and solar wind regions close to the Sun, strong scintillation effects appear at their amplitude, frequency and phase, especially in the regions very close to the Sun. This paper describes the effects in solar corona, and presents a Rician statistical model of the solar scintillation channel. The simulation results show that the much larger scintillation index at X-band (m = 0xutri37) than at Ka-band (m = 0xutri064) results in a much higher performance degradation, and at BER = 10^nwarr5, the link performance at X-band degrades more than 8 dB, while the Ka-band performance degrades less than 0.2 dB.