Hi to all, im searching about information about Groundstations that use optical communications instead of radiofrecuency. Someone knows if its there any satellite using this technology to read about it?
Thanks in advance.
Mat LU4BA
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Hey Mat! I did some research on this subject and it seems very interesting. NASA’s TBIRD satellite uses laser communication to transmit at high data rates, around 200Gbps
Making a groundstation for this is difficult, however, you need an extremely fast photo receptor, a telescope, and a tracker that can track the satellites with precision. because of how small visible light is, you must be in the laser footprint, otherwise you will get no signal
Hopes this helps!
Kira
Sources:
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Hi Mat,
My company built a ground based laser beacon to signal to PIXL-1, when it passed over Europe. I think it used 15xx nm wavelength to transmit sine and square waveforms.
https://www.eoportal.org/satellite-missions/pixl-1#eop-quick-facts-section
Best regards,
Jason G7ODQ
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As you can see in this tweet, an optical ground station is basically a telescope: https://x.com/KSAT_Kongsberg/status/1387457585532579840
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@davidfdzp Haha an expensive one at that!
My first exposure to optical communication was with NASA-JPL OPALS experiment, if I remember back when I’m still at high school. That feels like a real-life Star Trek technology to me back then 
I think NASA now employ laser communication for deep space mission on Psyche spacecraft called DSOC. They used Hale 100-inch telescope to receive the signal from 31 million km away with max speed of 267 Mbps; the test data was a cat video (yes, an actual cat video lol).
NASA was testing laser/optical communication because they want to test alternative communication to its DSN network (it’s getting crowded/almost fully booked there).
Anyway it’s a cool technology to have in the future!
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