ALEXANDRIA, Va., March 17 -- United States Patent no. 12,580,640, issued on March 17, was assigned to Hughes Network Systems LLC (Germantown, Md.).

"Ground system techniques to support flexible reconfigurable satellite payload operation" was invented by Satyajit Roy (Gaithersburg, Md.), Murali Regunathan (Germantown, Md.) and Rajeev Oza (Germantown, Md.).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "Methods, systems, and apparatus, including computer programs encoded on computer-storage media, for ground system techniques to support flexible reconfigurable satellite payload operation. In some implementations, a satellite communication network is managed to operate in a first configuration. The satellite comm...