Solar Scintillation Effects on Telecommunication Links at Ka-Band and X-Band

Many deep-space missions encounter solar conjunction. Some missions, such as Solar Probe and Stardust, encounter solar conjunction during their main missions. The Sun–Earth–Probe (SEP) angle is used to describe the degree of conjunction. When the SEP angle is small, the solar plasma causes degradation in telecommunication link performance. In this article, we present a model that we developed to study the amplitude scintillation effects on telemetry signals at both 8.4 GHz (X-band) and 32 GHz (Ka-band). Both analytical and simulated results show that, at a low bit-error rate (<10−5), X-band links suffer degradation of 8.2 dB for the Solar Probe mission at perihelion. Ka-band links, however, suffer only a few tenths of a dB. In addition to this 8-dB Ka-band advantage over X-band under scintillation conditions, there is also the 4to 6-dB Ka-band advantage due to higher frequency.