Ocean Data Telemetry Microsat Link

"Despite careful planning, one extremely critical aspect of oceanographic data collection has been neglected. Although it is now possible to deploy thousands of oceanographic data collection platforms that can collect prodigious amounts of data forrelatively little money, there is no practical, timely way to get all that data from those remote platforms to researchers. The oceanography community has tacitly assumed that by the time they needed satellite communications for their data collectionprograms, a number of commercial systems would be in place to choose from. The fallacy of that assumption is suddenly very clear with the bankruptcy of nearly every satellite communication company that made it so far as having satellites in orbit.This proposal lays out the first phase of a plan for the concept, design, and development of a satellite communication system that is specifically targeted to the needs of the oceanographic community. In this phase we propose to update our awareness of theneeds of the oceanographic community, develop a current set of system requirements, and with that input, develop an end-to-end satellite communication system concept. This concept will comprise the proposed constellation, satellite hardware subsystems,communications protocols, ground systems infrastructure, and ocean platform hardware. The size of the market for oceanographic data retrieval is relatively small, with potential users counted in thousands.