A global satellite link sensor network

With the raising number of space missions performed with nano-and pico-sized satellites, significant increase of mission data return becomes more and more important. As a consequence of the low earth orbit the satellites are deployed in, the communication timeframe between spacecrafts and ground stations is limited to half an hour a day. Nowadays non-commercial ground stations join forces by establishing ground station networks to optimize resource utilization and data return. Although the primary goal of such networks is to increase the amount of data transferred between spacecrafts and ground controls, link quality measurements performed by the ground stations during each satellite pass provide impressive remote sensing potential. In this paper the interpretation of more than two thousand satellite pass recordings performed during the last year at the University of Aalborg in Denmark are presented. Furthermore the potential of remote sensing utilizing ground station networks is demonstrated by means of possible scenarios described in detail.