Assessment and uncertainty estimation of weather-forecast driven data transfer for space exploration at Ka- and X-band
This paper aims at improving and assessing a previously developed technique to predict data volume transfer during deep-space satellite communication links at Ka- and $X$ -band (where the Earth's atmosphere affects propagating signals). The proposed technique exploits a weather forecast (WF) model to predict the atmospheric state and a radiative transfer model to convert the atmospheric state into radiopropagation variables. The latter are used to design the link budget and to maximize transferred data-volume.