BepiColombo Mission to Mercury: Designing RadioMetOP Weather-Forecast Based Operations to Improve Satellite Data Throughput at Ka-Band

The weather-forecast based Radio Meteorological Operation Planner (RadioMetOP) model for the dynamical satellite link-budget design and its operational application to the BepiColombo ESA deep-space mission to Mercury is described. BepiColombo is the first European deep-space mission adopting Ka-band for the downlink of telemetry data. At such high frequency, conventional link budget techniques, based on past climatological statistics, are not usually suitable. RadioMetOP provides a channel prediction dynamical model, exploiting atmospheric statistics derived by numerical weather forecasts run on the specific transmission period and ground station, coupled with a radiopropagation model for estimating both path atmospheric attenuation and sky noise temperature. The use of RadioMetOP should improve the scientific data throughput when compared to conventional link budget design techniques. RadioMetOP model will be operationally ingested within the BepiColombo mission operation activities and tested thanks to the collaboration with ESA-ESOC. RadioMetOP model approach can be generalized to become a multi-mission, multi-site, and multi-frequency suitable for future satellite mission at Ka band and above.