Design of a Payload Data Handling System for Satellites

With the different and diverse requirements of the research, military, agricultural or scientific satellite missions, more and more organizations and institutes are participating in the satellite missions on the payload research and applications. The scientific and housekeeping data of the payloads is important for research and applications. The payload data handling system is interfacing the payloads to the onboard data handling system. Onboard systems can be standardized thus enabling a suitable and convenient platform for production and the third party, which will save the cost, time and personnel. Satellite subsystems are introduced first in this paper. Based on the requirements of the payload data handling, design of a universal payload data handling system is proposed. The functional modules, the electrical interfaces and protocols are described in detail. Finally, an implementation of the payload data handling is shown here. Standard bus interfaces and protocols like MIL-STD-1553B bus, RS485 bus, UART, RS422 and PCM (Pulse Coding Modulation), are adopted. The design of the payload data handling system in this paper, which is high performance, reliable and reusable, has common standard interfaces for the payloads, and can support multiple missions.