A Real Time Differential GPS Tracking System for NASA Sounding Rockets

Barton Bull

Abstract:	Sounding rockets are suborbital launch vehicles capable of carrying scientific payloads several hundred miles in altitude. These missions return a variety of scientific data including; chemical makeup and physical processes taking place in the atmosphere, natural radiation surrounding the Earth, data on the Sun, stars, galaxies and many other phenomena. In addition, sounding rockets provide an economical and quick means of conducting engineering tests of instruments to be used on satellites and other spacecraft. Typically around thirty of these rockets are launched each year, either from established ranges at Wallops Island, Virginia; Poker Flat Research Range, Alaska; White Sands Missile Range, New Mexico; Churchill, Canada; Andoya, Norway; and Esrange, Sweden. Many launches are conducted from temporary launch ranges in remote parts of the world requiring considerable expense to transport and operate tracking radars. In order to support these missions, an inverse differential GPS system has been developed. The flight system consists of a receiver, a preamplifier and a wrap around antenna. A rugged, compact, portable ground station extracts GPS data from the raw payload telemetry stream, performs a real time differential solution and graphically displays the rocket's path relative to a predicted trajectory plot. In addition to generating a real time navigation solution, the system has been used for payload recovery, slaving of optical tracking systems for over the horizon acquisition, timing, data timetagging and precise tracking of multiple payloads This paper discusses in detail the flight and ground hardware, as well as data processing and operational aspects of the system and provides evidence of the system accuracy.
Published in:	Proceedings of the 13th International Technical Meeting of the Satellite Division of The Institute of Navigation (ION GPS 2000) September 19 - 22, 2000 Salt Palace Convention Center Salt Lake City, UT
Pages:	2028 - 2037
Cite this article:	Bull, Barton, "A Real Time Differential GPS Tracking System for NASA Sounding Rockets," Proceedings of the 13th International Technical Meeting of the Satellite Division of The Institute of Navigation (ION GPS 2000), Salt Lake City, UT, September 2000, pp. 2028-2037.
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