Satellite Mission Development: Signal Processing Radio Frequency
Location: Adelaide, SA
Duration: 5 months
Please note: Due to security requirements, students must have Australian Citizenship to apply. Any applicants not meeting this requirement will automatically be deemed ineligible for this project.
Project Background
Inovor Technologies is a South Australian company offering specialist development services and satellite mission solutions. Inovor provide turnkey nanosatellite solutions for clients using our Apogee nanosatellite bus. The Apogee bus provides the power, pointing, mission control and telemetry systems all integrated into a lightweight modular structure.
Inovor are also developing a nanosatellite-based space situational awareness (SSA) mission called Hyperion, The Hyperion mission will support the global SSA effort using a constellation of 12U nanosatellites in Low Earth Orbit (LEO), observing the Medium Earth Orbit (MEO) and GEO orbital bands. Hyperion will provide large amounts of disparate data into the global space surveillance network. As part of this Inovor is looking for a PhD student to support a Radio Frequency (RF) beam steering application on the satellite.
Research to be Conducted
The project will explore approaches to RF beam steering to distinguish two RF sources in close proximity to each other. They will also investigate ways to characterise the signals in simple terms such as frequency and bandwidth. The student will develop a high-level system design for the receiving unit and develop the beam steering algorithms to achieve the desired beams/nulls. The student should also have experience working with prototyping hardware or software defined radios and be able to set up an experimental system to demonstrate the algorithm
The student undertaking the project will be expended to develop algorithms that could possibly be deployed in dedicated hardware platforms, so knowledge of embedded systems would be useful but not necessary.
Skills Required
If you’re a PhD student and meet some or all the below we want to hear from you. We strongly encourage women, indigenous and disadvantaged candidates to apply:
- RF signal processing and beam steering
- Machine learning
- RF electronics
Expected Outcomes
Assessment of ability to distinguish and simply characterise signals on a small satellite platform.
Additional Details
The intern will receive $3,000 per month of the internship, usually in the form of stipend payments.
It is expected that the intern will primarily undertake this research project during regular business hours, spending at least 80% of their time on-site with the industry partner. The intern will be expected to maintain contact with their academic mentor throughout the internship either through face-to-face or phone meetings as appropriate.
The intern and their academic mentor will have the opportunity to negotiate the project’s scope, milestones and timeline during the project planning stage.
Applications Close
12 February 2020
Reference
APR – 1050
