Ground Segment

The ORION ground segment handles data reception, model training, and dataset management. It runs on the ground station host (typically the operator's Mac or a dedicated server).

Components

Module	Purpose
Receiver	TCP server receiving HIGH-priority image frames from the satellite via the simulated X-band link
Training Pipeline	QLoRA fine-tuning, validation, and GGUF quantization of the LFM2.5-VL-1.6B model
Dataset	Target definitions, image dataset generation from SimSat, and train/test split management

Integration with Flight Segment

The ground segment connects to the flight segment through two independent channels:

• F-Prime GDS (port 50000): Command uplink and telemetry/event downlink. Always active.
• Ground Receiver (port 50050): Image frame downlink via the ORIO protocol. Active only during DOWNLINK mode.

For GPU, RAM, and disk requirements across training, quantization, and validation, see Compute Budgets.

SimSat runs separately and provides both orbital position data and Mapbox satellite imagery to the flight segment via HTTP.