Climate monitoring and disaster prevention using a reconfigurable sattelite communication system – TOLTECA

A satellite communication system for climate monitoring and disaster prevention is proposed. The communication system is based on a reconfigurable RF transceiver capable of establishing inter-satellite communication as well as communication between the nano-satellite and terrestrial stations. The system needs to be reconfigurable in order to establish communication at different frequency bands and using different satellite communication standards.
CIDTE, a joint research center between the Autonomous University of Zacatecas and the Mexican Space Agency, will design the climate monitoring system. A French University, UPMC, will design the power-efficient multi-standard RF front-end integrated circuit. A French SME, NanoXplore, will design the radiation-hardened reconfigurable digital integrated circuits. A Mexican research institute, CINVESTAV, will develop the baseband algorithms for the different wireless communication systems.

Natural disasters are an important cause of economical and human losses in Mexico. Each year the country is stroked mainly by wildfires, floods and landslides that destroy thousands of homes, agricultural land and highways. According to a report emitted by the ONU, México is included is the country suffering the most from economical losses due to natural disasters. Hence, prevention activities for anticipating possible disasters are mandatory in practically all the world, but particularly in Mexico.
Programs oriented to disaster prevention can benefit from satellite monitoring networks that provide wide area images in multiple spectral bands, potentiating the ability to cover the national territory efficiently. Specific applications of this technology include:
- Floods: a) Monitoring of river banks, b) Change on river floods, c) Identification and reallocation of population on risk and d) Detection of flooded areas
- Wildfires: a) Early detection b) Monitoring of propagation and c) Suffocation planning

However, there are still significant technical challenges for achieving this approach. First, it is required to develop a novel communication system that allows the Nano-satellite to communicate with the earth-station and with other Nano-satellites. It also requires that nano-satellites are capable of establishing wireless communication using several standards while covering a large frequency range.The system integrated in the nano-satellite should be capable of establishing terrestrial and inter-satellite communication with the main earth observation satellites in the UHF-band (0.3 - 3 GHz): ARGOS, SPOT, ENVISAT, SARSAT, SESS, GPSOS and GOES. State of the art wireless transceivers capable of operating at different frequency bands and for different communication standards are bulky and have very high power consumption. They are therefore not convenient for satellite operations where power is scarce. Furthermore, if digital algorithms required for each application are implemented separately on the same IC, a very large silicon area will be needed. Finally, the technology in which the solution would be implemented must be resistant to space radiation.
Therefore, it becomes clear that new reconfigurable radio architectures are required for fulfilling the mentioned complex requirements for the upcoming high-performance and strong constraint that the satellite and nano-satellite communications imply.
In this project, we propose a system for earth monitoring and disaster prevention that could work even under the mentioned constraints.
The system is composed of mainly two parts: a) A TOLTECA software in the earth station for interpreting the camera images and thus detecting and preventing disasters and climate changes, and b) A TOLTECA chip installed in a Nano-satellite for processing the camera images, transfer the images to the earth station, and communicate with other Nano-satellites in the swarm configuration.