SAN FRANCISCO – NASA has been concentrating on the ground component of optical communications networks while the U.S. Space Force Space Development Agency focuses on space-to-space communications.
The two initiatives will intersect in two-to-three years when NASA determines whether the commercial terminals SDA is adopting for satellite-to-satellite communications can transmit data to Earth.
“We are going to have some commercial space terminals pointed down, talking to our existing ground sites,” Jason Mitchell, NASA Space Communications and Navigation program executive, told SpaceNews at the American Geophysical Union meeting here in December.
Space to Ground
Atmospheric turbulence makes the task of transmitting optical data to the ground challenging. Successful transmission requires prediction and modeling to determine how Earth atmosphere will distort signals. And ground stations require adaptive optics to correct for that turbulence.
NASA’s Space Communications and Navigation (SCaN) program has been addressing those challenges since the Lunar Laser Communications Demonstration traveled to the moon in 2013 on the Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer.
Following LLCD, which broke the record for the fastest data rate between the moon and Earth, NASA sent the Laser Communications Relay Demonstration (LCRD) to geosynchronous orbit. LCRD, hosted on the Defense Department’s Space Test Program Satellite 6, has delivered data to Earth at speeds as high as 1.2 gigabits-per-second.
Progress on optical communications is accelerating, Mitchell said, with the success of the TeraByte InfraRed Delivery, a payload on NASA’s Pathfinder Technology Demonstrator 3 launched in 2022, and Deep Space Optical Communications (DSOC) experiment.
DSOC, launched in October on the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s Psyche asteroid mission, sent a 15-second high-definition cat video to the Hale Telescope at the California Institute of…
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