according to NASAThe feat was accomplished by a team from the Glenn Research Center in Cleveland. It was part of a series of tests on new technology that could provide live video coverage to astronauts on the moon during Artemis missions.
NASA’s blog adds that NASA has historically relied on radio waves to send information to and from space. However, laser communications use infrared light to transmit data 10 to 100 times faster than radio frequency systems.
Engineers from Glenn Research Center, in collaboration with the Air Force Research Laboratory and NASA’s Small Business Innovation Research Program, temporarily installed a portable laser station on the belly of a Pilatus PC-12. They then flew over Lake Erie, sending data from the plane to an optical ground station in Cleveland. From there, it was sent via a ground network to NASA’s White Sands Test Facility in Las Cruces, New Mexico, where scientists used infrared light signals to send the data.
The signals traveled 22,000 miles from Earth to NASA’s Laser Communications Relay Demonstration (LCRD) orbiting platform. The platform then relayed the signals to the ILLUMA-T (Integrated User Modem and Amplifier Terminal LCRD LEO) payload on the orbiting laboratory, which then sent the data back to Earth. During the experiments, High-Speed Delay-Tolerant Networks (HDTN), a new system developed at Glenn, helped the signal penetrate cloud cover more effectively, the blog added.
“We can now build on the success of 4K HD video streaming to and from the space station to provide future capabilities, such as high-definition video conferencing, for Artemis astronauts, which will be important for crew health and activity coordination,” said Dr. Daniel Raible, HDTN principal investigator at Glenn.
“The teams at Glenn ensure that new ideas are not locked in the lab, but actually brought to the relevant environment to ensure that this technology can mature to improve the lives of all of us,” added James Demers, Glenn’s president of aircraft operations.
As NASA continues to develop advanced scientific instruments to capture high-resolution data on the Moon and beyond, the agency’s Space Communications and Navigation (SCaN) program is relying on new technology such as laser communications to send large amounts of information to Earth.
Published July 27, 2024, 10:16 he
