ICSat Operations Concept

ICSat is designed to receive uplink data at 1.767 GHz and to transmit downlink data at 2.202 GHz.  It will only be operational concurrent to satellite passes over the ground station at the United States Naval Academy. 

ICSat will be capable of communicating not only telemetry data, but information from the many experiments on board MidSTAR, as well.  The purpose of this experimental communications system is to test the feasibility of a 1 Mbps data rate.  This in and of itself is not a remarkable but feat, but ICSat will be the first system to accomplish it through the use of commercial "off the shelf" products.  If successful, ICSat will be drastically less expensive than it's custom manufactured counterparts while still maintaining exceptional data rates.