University Class Open Ground Station (UniClOGS) is an open-source and open-hardware ground station designed and used by the Portland Space Aerospace Society (PSAS). UniClOGS contains ground station software derived from Yet Another Mission Control Software (YAMCS) open-source software. This software allows for the sending and receiving data from satellites such as OreSat0, Oregon’s first open-source cube satellite.
As part of this internship, I built upon the existing YAMCS software to validate packets sent and received from PSAS satellites. This includes integrity and security checks on packets, such as CRC (Cyclic redundancy checks) to ensure that packet data was not corrupted in transit, and HMAC (Hash-based Message Authentication Codes) to ensure that commanding was authenticated to be from PSAS. This builds a foundation in which we can verify that a satellite has received a command from the ground station and receive the satellite action receipt with respect to the command sent, and view this information in the ground station software.
With these foundations in place, I was able to modularize the components for the ground station software to allow for extensibility for future satellite components and future additional satellites altogether. This allows for scalability within UniClOGS to dynamically support multiple satellites and many subsystems within each satellite.