THE ADVENT OF NEW ESA MISSIONS LIKE BEPI COLOMBO AND GAIA, with need of high telemetry data rates, while at a considerably far distance from earth, makes necessary the use of more sophisticated telemetry coding schemes than the one already present in the IFMS. The options inside the ECSS and CCSDS standards are concatenated punctured convolutional codes or Turbo codes.
GAIA has selected concatenated punctured convolutional codes because they provide a good balance between coding gain and bandwidth efficiency, while with a moderate decoding complexity, allowing the use of the present IFMS platform, at data rates up to around 10 Mbit/s at the decoder input.
Bepi-Colombo, on the other hand, due to link budget constraints, does not need so high data rates (around 1.5 Mbit/s is the limit). At these moderate data rates, the use of Turbo coding is still possible in the present IFMS platform.
Therefore ESOC has decided to enhance the IFMS, through its contractors BAE SYSTEMS and MakaluMedia, with concatenated punctured convolutional codes and Turbo codes capability, by extending the existing TCDS (Telemetry Channel Decoding System).
Bepi-Columbo consists of two spacecrafts, to be launched in 2013, which will cruise around Mercury.
Gaia is a mission to be launched in 2011, that will conduct a census of one thousand million stars in our Galaxy.
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