Weather-forecast based RMOP link-budget approach experimentation: data-transfer optimization at Ka-band with Hayabusa-2 satellite mission support

This work describes the operative experimentation of a weather-forecast based satellite link-budget approach at Ka-band (named RMOP) during 6 months of collaboration with JAXA and ESA within Hayabusa-2 deep-space mission. Operative link-budget design was performed 24 hours before each scheduled transmission window providing JAXA and ESA with optimized symbol-rates (to adopt during the transmission) and the corresponding expected signal-to-noise ratio values allowing a real-time monitoring of the predicted atmospheric channel status. The comparison between simulations and measurements proves the accuracy of the RMOP tool with correlation values higher than 0.9, bias lower than 0.8 dB and error standard deviation lower than 0.7 dB. The optimization analysis confirms the strong potential of the RMOP approach providing gain values higher than 5 dB in terms of signal-to-noise ratio and higher than 100% in terms of transmitted data-volume. These results pave the way to an operative scheduling of a weather-forecast based link-budget approach for future satellite missions.