Weather related continuity and completeness on deep space Ka-band links: Statistics and forecasting

Due to lack of spectrum at 8.41 GHz (X-band) future NASA deep space missions will be using 32 GHz Ka-band. Since combating adverse weather events require gins at Ka-band, link design methods prohibitively large margins based on maximizing the average data return over the link subject to a minimum link availability have been proposed. Furthermore, weather forecasting has also been suggested as means of combating the weather effects on the link. While the performance of these methods in term of data return has been well-understood, questions have remained about the completeness and continuity performance of the link. In this paper the concept of link "stability" as means of measuring the continuity of the link is introduced and through it, along with the distributions of "good" periods and "bad" periods, the performance of the proposed Ka-band link design method using both forecasting and long-term statistics has been analyzed. The results indicate that the proposed link design method has relatively good continuity and completeness characteristics even when only long-term statistics are used and that the continuity performance further improves when forecasting is employed.