For the purpose of monitoring the status of the mission, as well as payload requirements(like imaging payloads) in some other cases, the satellite will transmit the health of various components during downlink. Without communications, a satellite is essentially a rock in space. In this regard, the flight code must be prepared to send the payload data and health data in packets encoded using the communications protocol, at designed rate whenever the satellite is over the ground station. <br \>

Also the provision for receiving commands via uplink (commands like kill, reset etc.) has to be present, and the flight code should know what necessary actions to take thereafter.

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