J-CROSS – Joint Communications and Sensing for Spaceborne Earth Observation

Role: Principal Investigator (PI, SnT Prime)
Funding: European Space Agency (ESA ARTES IC) · Partners: GomSpace & RSS-Hydro
Official Page: uni.lu/snt-en/research-projects/j-cross/

Executive Summary

J-CROSS is a European Space Agency (ESA ARTES IC) project led by SnT – University of Luxembourg as Prime Contractor in collaboration with GomSpace and RSS-Hydro. The project investigates feasibility, designs 6G Non-Terrestrial Network (NTN) dual-function waveforms, and builds a TRL-4 Software-Defined Radio (SDR) laboratory demonstrator for spaceborne Joint Communications and Sensing (JCAS) applied to Earth observation.

Key Objectives & Contributions

• Spaceborne JCAS Use Cases: Ku/Ka-band rainfall and tropospheric weather estimation from communication Channel State Information (CSI), radar altimetry, flood mapping, and maritime vessel surveillance.
• Dual-Function 6G-NTN Waveforms: Joint optimization of communication spectral efficiency and radar range-Doppler ambiguity functions on size-, weight-, and power-constrained (SWaP) CubeSat payloads.
• TRL-4 SDR Demonstrator: Experimental validation in the 6GSPACE Lab powered by a dedicated Dell Pro Max Tower T2 workstation (Intel Core Ultra 9 285K, 128 GB RAM, NVIDIA RTX 5000 Ada) and USRP SDR transceivers.

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