The SAP4PRISMA is a four year research project which aims at developing algorithms and products for the future PRISMA mission. The project started on May 2010 and is now entering his full activities as the ”PRISMA like” data set has been defined and the test areas were selected. The paper describes the main project objectives and the activities realized in the first 9 months of the project.

TEST 02 - Elsevier's Scopus, the largest abstract and citation database of peer-reviewed literature. Search and access research from the science, technology, medicine, social sciences and arts and humanities fields.

Frequency-division multiple access (FDMA) and single channel per carrier (SCPC) in the uplink and time-division multiplexing (TDM) in the downlink are employed in the system described. To interface FDMA in the uplink and TDM in the downlink, multicarrier demodulation (MCD) is required onboard the satellite. The operation of the onboard MCD is the separation of each individual channel and subsequent demodulation. The results, which concern onboard frequency demultiplexing and demodulation for low-bit-rate carriers, are constrained by the requirement that new-generation payloads could serve the stations already active in the INTELSAT Business System. A digital hardware design that implements an MCD that can process three channels at 4.4 Mb/s or 12 channels at 1.1. Mb/s is described. The test results confirm the MCD feasibility, and further improvements are expected from a semicustom implementation.>