Aireon's initial on-orbit performance analysis of space-based ADS-B

On January 14th, 2017, the first SpaceX rocket launch of 10 of Iridium NEXT's satellites generated an exciting milestone towards the global coverage of Aireon's space-based Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast (ADS-B) system [1]. ADS-B is a cornerstone technology for the aviation industry that enables significant improvements in aircraft based travel efficiency and safety. Aireon's hosted payload ADS-B receivers have the potential to accelerate and extend the benefits of ADS-B to the entire Air Traffic Management (ATM) community by significantly expanding the boundaries of legacy infrastructure. To evaluate the full extent of this potential, the Aireon team embarked on a series of functional and performance tests on the hosted payloads as well as integration with the operational system. About 2 weeks after the first launch, Aireon began to receive and analyze on orbit ADS-B data from equipped aircraft. This paper describes the key test approaches, results, and analysis that were used to tune and verify Aireon's space-based ADS-B models to estimate the expected end-state ADS-B data service metrics when all 66 operational satellites have reached their mission orbit.