2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Ground stations are essential for space missions to conduct data retrieval, telemetry, tracking, and control. Knowledge of these functions and ground station operations are necessary for the education of future aerospace engineers. In fact, ABET accreditation requires that a subset of these astronautical engineering topics be taught in all aerospace engineering curricula. In the past, ground station use has been limited to government and private space sectors due to their cost. As a result, this has led to few laboratory activities that employ ground station technologies in engineering programs. More recently, the cost of ground station components has decreased, along with an increase in publicly available designs, making ground stations more accessible to universities. Leveraging the newfound accessibility of ground stations in aerospace education, this paper develops an approach for the implementation of a university ground station and pedagogical activities designed for aerospace engineering students.
The aerospace engineering pedagogy that has been developed in this paper began with the construction of learning objectives. The learning objectives were developed using Bloom’s Taxonomy in conjunction with knowledge of aerospace engineering curricula. These objectives were created using the six major categories of cognitive processes from Bloom: remember, understand, apply, analyze, evaluate, and create in conjunction with specific verbs corresponding to the six categories. The learning objectives were compartmentalized into three sections telecommunications, orbital mechanics, and data collection and analysis. These sections ensure alignment of the learning objectives with courses within the aerospace engineering curriculum through the use of hands-on ground station activities that fulfill ABET criteria. The format and structure of these activities were based on a literature review of different engineering laboratory manuals and their activities for similar topics. These activities focus on the use of an on-campus ground station for laboratory experiments. Ground stations provide students the opportunity to learn the fundamentals of telecommunications and orbital mechanics through hands-on interactive activities where students will apply their knowledge and skills to analyze real-world problems using the ground station. These activities were designed to use software and online resources to operate and collect the data from the ground station. Several resources were utilized to ensure the functionality and integration of the constructed on-campus ground station for the desired learning objectives. In order to ensure the accessibility of the developed approach, the open-source SatNOGS: Satellite Networked Open Ground Station was employed in this work. SatNOGS provides several different configurations of varying antennae, rotators, and rotator controllers for many different types of ground stations. The ground station selected was chosen based on its ability to connect with the learning objectives. This study develops, outlines, and discusses the design and application of a university ground station along with laboratory pedagogy for aerospace engineering programs.