The APL 18.3m station upgrade and its application to lunar missions

The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory has conducted an upgrade to its 18.3 meter ground station. These upgrades include adding a high-power S-band uplink, dual polarization S- and X-band downlink, multiple parallel downlink channel capability and software-defined telemetry, tracking and command (TT&C) units. The 18-m antenna size provides full-disk lunar coverage in S-band. This coverage, in combination with the parallel downlink capability and APL's coherent transceiver technology, affords the ability to track multiple lunar targets simultaneously. This paper presents the upgraded station architecture, its performance for current lunar missions, and discusses its application for different lunar mission scenarios.