Store and Forward Mission Design in Birds-4 Satellites

Abstract

One of the most reliable and effective options to approach disaster-affected areas or remote places is to utilize the satellite-based solutions. The store and forward (SFward) mission is developed to leverage this concept. In BIRDS-4 SFward mission, the satellites collect data from ground sensor terminals that contain specific data needed by an application and store it to an internal memory. When one of the satellites passes over the main ground station, it forwards the stored data. This mission can also be used to broadcast announcements from ground centers to distributed receivers from the amateur community. This is most useful during disasters where conventional terrestrial networks are down. The mission is useful for transmitting data from remote areas without ground-based networks, allowing the collection of data from these remote sites. This can be utilized to achieve many applications.