FAPEC in the UPC-BarcelonaTech 3CAT-2 CubeSat

3Cat-2 is a nano-satellite of the size of a “shoe box” developed under the NanoSat Lab programme of the Technical University of Catalonia (UPC). Designed and developed by Dr. Adriano Camps and his mission team, 3Cat-2 aims at performing ocean altimetry and scatterometry using Global Navigation Satellite Systems Reflectometry (GNSS-R), a sort of multi-static radar using GPS, Galileo and Beidou as signals of opportunity. 3Cat-2 will be launched during the first quarter of 2016, and it will be the first satellite that will use DAPCOM’s FAPEC data compression onboard, aiming at reducing the size of the dataset to be transmitted to the ground station and thus maximizing the efficiency of the available downlink at a negligible computing cost. The FAPEC C software implementation has been successfully integrated and validated in the ARM Cortex-A8 processor of the payload.