GoKawiilEarlier this month, NASA’s Artemis II mission sent four astronauts to orbit the moon and used new laser communications systems to beam dramatic images back to Earth.
One of the receivers, though, wasn’t hosted by the U.S. space agency. A low-cost terminal built by the companies Observable Space and Quantum Opus, and operated by the Australian National University, pulled down data broadcast from a spacecraft at the moon at a rate of 260 megabits per second.
That success proves that high-throughput connections between Earth and space can be done on the cheap, the companies say.
The terminal used Observable Space’s software and telescope to capture and lock onto the transmissions from the Orion spacecraft, and a photonic sensor built by Quantum Opus to decode the data. Their terminal cost less than $5 million, compared to more bespoke solutions that cost tens of millions of dollars.
NASA has been testing deep space laser communications for several years, including a demonstration of data links with a spacecraft 218 million miles from Earth on its way to an asteroid. Artemis II was its most comprehensive demonstration yet: NASA’s primary receivers in California and New Mexico, as well as the low-cost experimental terminal in Australia, all collected 4K video from the trip around the moon.
Though laser communications boast much higher throughput than radio frequency transmissions that remain the primary communications option for space, lasers are more vulnerable to disruptions from cloudy weather, and they must be within line of site of their target — hence the importance of having a reception site on the other side of the world from the U.S.
Josh Cassada, a former U.S. astronaut who co-founded Quantum Opus, pointed out that Australia was the first continent to appear in the first Earthrise photo captured by the Artemis II astronauts.
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