OPS-SAT is an ESA technology demonstration cubesat which includes a colour camera, a Software Defined Radio (SDR) receiver and a powerful ARM processor. One of the experiments executed there is FAPEC, a high-performance and versatile data compression software. Among others, it features image compression and linear prediction coding algorithms, suitable for multi-band and baseband radio-frequency (RF) samples, respectively. Since its deployment on-board OPS-SAT in late 2020, FAPEC has allowed for downloading a large set of Earth Observation images. Recently, thanks to ESA Open Space Innovation Platform funds, these two algorithms from FAPEC are being improved to get better compression ratios and speeds, add video compression capabilities, and higher quality levels in case of lossy compression. A smart lossy approach is being developed for radio-frequency data, identifying the time segments with signal presence and quantizing noise-only samples to further reduce the size. In order to identify the really useful files to be downloaded from the satellite, on-board data analysis capabilities are being developed as well. In this work we present in-orbit results, recent developments and preliminary results obtained with the new algorithms on real data.

Peer Reviewed