Coding for space telemetry and telecommand transmissions in presence of solar scintillation

We discuss some of the results achieved in the RESCUe project, funded by the European Space Agency, whose goal is improving the reliability and capacity of radio links near superior conjunctions, i.e., in the presence of phase and amplitude scintillation due to solar wind and solar corona. In this paper, in particular, the focus is on the error correcting codes that can be used to maintain acceptable values of the signal-to-noise ratio to achieve prefixed error rate targets, even in the presence of very unfavorable propagation conditions. Both the cases of telemetry and telecommand are considered. We report several numerical results, and propose a procedure to finalize the design in order to determine the maximum data rates achievable.