Nowadays domestic equipment is often equipped with wireless sensors connected to smart phones and implementation of wireless instrumentation in aeronautics presently ongoing. Also new generation satellites are designed to allow high data rate in-flight communication and data processing using wireless technologies. But, until now, there are no publicly available concepts for the use of this technology in sounding rocket applications. Electrical harnessing is a frequently underestimated but very critical component of flight vehicles. Implementation and functional check as well as troubleshooting of harness interfaces is time consuming and costly.
A smart wireless communication system with standardized data interface definitions could decentralize and reduce AIT/AIV efforts significantly and allow increased modularity of the vehicle data management. As reference design case of this study a wireless communication system will be placed in each section transmitting data through a wireless interfaces to the service module. The service module integrates the wireless data stream with those received through traditional serial and network interfaces, assemble the telemetry stream and downlink the data to the ground station.
With this approach it is possible to integrate and test each system independently.
This approach also opens the possibility for performing cost efficient experiments to be flown as piggyback on an existing or planned sounding rocket flight experiments.
Main activities of the proposed study are:
- Development of concepts for application of wireless technology for in-flight applications
- Design and build a engineering system as in-kind contribution for a wireless inter-stage communication on sounding rockets
- Validate the function and compatibility in an represented ground base setup.
- Documentation
