Feasibility Study for GNSS Radio Occultation from an Integrated Sensing and Communications Platform

AnySignal is introducing a solution to overcome the trade-off between coverage area, revisit rate, data timeliness, and data volume in earth observation satellite systems as specifically applied to radio occultation data collection. This proposal involves a novel hardware approach, employing an Integrated Sensing and Communications (ISaC) software-defined radio (SDR) named Iris. Iris, housed aboard large satellites weighing 200kg or more, aims to stand out by uniquely combining communication and radiofrequency (RF) sensing capabilities into a single platform. It is proposed that host satellites will procure Iris for robust data links (space-to-ground, ground-to-space, and space-to-space), whilst AnySignal concurrently leverages the unique ability of Iris to collect RF datasets. While Iris currently serves as a standalone communications product for satellite customers, its potential as an RF sensing platform remains in the early stages of R&D.