Frontier Radio
In addition, the Frontier-S and Frontier-X are licensed derivatives manufactured by commercial aerospace company Rocket Lab.
[4] These efforts were successful; for example, the transceiver for New Horizons managed to save 12 W from total mission power and ended up being a mission-enabler.
The SDR platform would accommodate transceivers with higher data-rate return link capabilities and better radiation tolerance than previous radios.
[4] The FR also flew on NASA's Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) missions, where it featured improvements such as support for higher data rates at X-Band.
It combines the robust nature and processing power of the original radio with a reprogrammable design and more modern architecture used by the FR Lite.
Certain features can also be reconfigured in flight, like in-band channel assignment, bit rate, loop bandwidths, and coding formats, and modulation schemes.
Originally an S-band radio, FR Lite was the first in the family to be reprogrammable, and is designed for missions with high risk tolerance and quick schedules.
The first is a two-way radio operating at S-band, and the second is a L-band receiver for GPS L1 & L2, renamed the Extensible Global Navigation System (EGNS).
The S-band version of this radio has been transferred to industry and can be purchased from Rocket Lab under the name Frontier-S.[5] The FR Lite uses a reprogrammable field-programmable gate array (FPGA) instead of a dedicated Application Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC), greatly decreasing development cost and allowing increased flexibility.
With receive and transmit throughputs greater than 1 GBPs, FR ML was developed at the direction of NASA's Space Communications and Navigation Program, meant as a first step to replace the aging Tracking and Data Relay Satellite System (TDRSS) constellation.
Improvements in processing power, predistortion, and RF front end linearity enable support of uplink and downlink data rates in excess of 1 GBps.
The Frontier-S and Frontier-X are a variants of the Frontier Radio Lite manufactured by United States-based aerospace company Rocket Lab, who licensed the design in 2021 for commercial use.
It will be first flown on the upcoming NASA SIMPLEx mission to Mars EscaPADE[11] *Bare slices only; total volume/mass depends on packaging.
The current plan for the radio is for the Europa Lander and its Carrier and Relay Stage (CRS) to use a version of the heritage FR with added X-band functionality for cross-band uplink and downlink.
