Telecommunications RF Tool for NASA's Europa Clipper Mission

The RF Tool will predict the parameters and link characteristics that describe the telecommunications state between the Europa Clipper spacecraft along its phases of the mission trajectory, and NASA's Deep Space Network (DSN) ground stations over a selected interval of time. The RF Tool is currently in development at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) as part of the Europa Clipper Ground Data System (GDS). Though developed at APL, there is strong collaboration between APL and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) telecommunications engineers and Mission Operations for technical and operational exchanges. The telecommunications engineers and Mission Operations personnel at APL and at JPL would be primary users. The RF Tool will be a cloud based, Python 3 encoded, standalone application, as well as an in-the-loop application within Europa Clipper's mission planning software. Mission Operations and Mission Planning, at both APL and JPL, will use the RF Tool to assist long-term and short-term planning for the Europa Clipper Mission. The RF Tool can also be used in an independent engineering platform for analysis, trending, or case studies. The RF Tool will receive inputs from mission planning applications, ground station parameters and weather, spacecraft radio parameters, spacecraft attitude and ephemerides. Along with predicting the telecommunications parameters and link characteristics, the RF Tool will assist in DSN support scheduling, coordinating the downlink of engineering and science data, managing the uplink and downlink rates, and providing the optimum telecommunications configuration for each DSN track, which includes but is not limited to, spacecraft antenna selection, radio settings, and data rates at X-Band and/or Ka-Band. The RF Tool will also have the built in functionality to aid in the assessment of the overall telecommunications link to further aid in optimization efforts.