Small Spacecraft Community of Practice
Subscribe to receive announcements for the Small Spacecraft Systems Virtual Institute’s (S3VI) monthly webinar series and quarterly newsletter here. We look forward to your participation!
Opportunities for Small Sat Missions with the New Near Space Network
Speaker: Obadiah Kegege, Ph.D., NASA Goddard Space Flight Center
Wednesday, April 21, 2021
10:00AM-11:00AM Pacific Daylight Time
Click here to watch the webinar.
Click here to download the presentation.
Abstract: Pioneered by NASA’s Space Communication and Navigation (SCaN) program, the use of commercial providers to support low-Earth orbit has been employed by Goddard’s Near-Earth Network (NEN) since the early 2000’s. The success of the NEN to date and the blueprint that we have established in using commercial providers to support low earth users has resulted in a solid framework to evolve and facilitate a new approach for commercialization in the near space region, by increasing industry participation and relying on 100% industry provided services by 2030.
The Near Space Network is comprised of commercial and NASA assets providing space communications and navigation services to missions in the Near Space region (out to 2M km from Earth). GSFC through the NSN is actively planning and seeking opportunities to collaborate with industry in order to onboard more providers, creating a diverse catalog of capabilities that will meet the unique needs of missions. This includes implementing a strategy and several initiatives to facilitate small sat missions. Initiatives include identifying and onboarding commercial service providers that can support small sat missions, evaluating how we can streamline mission planning and integration for small sat users, and exploring successful implementation of higher data rates, efficient modulation, and coding techniques.
Bio: Dr. Obadiah Kegege serves as an Engineering Project Manager supporting Near Space Network (NSN) projects/and matrixed to the Commercialization, Innovation, and Synergies (CIS) Office in the Exploration and Space Communications Projects Division at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. He is currently involved in the Network Operations Planning for the NSN and Mission Engagement for the CIS. Dr. Kegege previously served in the technical management for a number of projects: Ka-band Arraying Development; GOES Remote Ground Station development in Australia (collaboration with NOAA and USAF); and Ocean Color Instrument (OCI), part of the Plankton, Aerosol, Cloud, ocean Ecosystem (PACE) mission. Prior to that, Dr. Kegege had ~10 years of research and technology development supporting communication and navigation systems for space exploration. He has authored/co-authored several publications related to space communication systems and network architectures. Dr. Kegege obtained his BS in Control and Instrumentation Electronics from the University of Houston, MSEE from the University of Texas Pan American and a PhD from the University of Arkansas. Dr. Kegege is a member of IEEE, SPIE, NSBE, Instrumentation, Systems, and Automation Society (ISA), and National Technical Association (NTA).
S3VI encourages the community to submit questions before the webinar to enable more directed responses. Please send questions to raquel.l.redhouse@nasa.gov.
