Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 2009 · 137 citations · 1 references
EngineeringSatellite CommunicationOptical Wireless CommunicationSpace-based Optical NetworksBinary Phase ShiftOptical NetworksOptical PropertiesSpace CommunicationOptical NetworkingSatellite NetworkFree-space Optical NetworkPhotonicsTerminal DesignSatellite Signal ProcessingOptical TransmissionSmall SatelliteAerospace EngineeringHomodyne BpskOptical Fiber CommunicationOptoelectronics
A 5.6 Gbps optical communication link has been verified in-orbit. The intersatellite link uses homodyne BPSK (binary phase shift keying) and allows to transmit data with a duplex data rate of 5.6 Gbps and a bit error rate better than 10-9 between two LEO satellites, NFIRE (U.S.) and TerraSAR-X (Germany). We report on the terminal design and the link performance during the measurement campaign. As an outlook we report on the flight units adapted to LEO-to-GEO intersatellite links that TESAT currently builds and on plans to study GEO-to-ground links.
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