NASA Is Developing Laser Communications System

The American space agency is working hard towards creating an advanced optical communications system, which it plans to use on future deep-space missions. Such a technology will enable the transmission of HD videos and images from anywhere in the solar system.

At this time, conventional communications methods take about 90 minutes to deliver a batch of HD images from an orbiter or rover on the surface of Mars to NASA computers. This includes the 20-minute delay, the time it takes for radio signals to travel to and from the Red Planet.

With the new laser-based system, which the space agency plans to test as early as 2016, it may be possible to achieve extremely fast transfer rates. Spacecraft will no longer send signals through the ether, where they are prone to interferences.

Rather, they will communicate with ground stations and tracking antennas with direct laser beams. The Laser Communications Relay Demonstration (LCRD) project will be the first to test the new system.

The mission was selected for a trial run by the NASA Office of the Chief Technologist (OCT), one in only three projects deemed advanced enough for this award. The demonstrator will be developed in Greenbelt, Maryland, by experts at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC).

According to current plans, the LCRD will first be deployed on a Space Systems/Loral commercial communications satellite, as an auxiliary payload. In time, it may replace conventional systems entirely, ushering in a new era of telecommunications capabilities.

“We want to take NASA's communications capabilities to the next level. Just as the home Internet user hit the wall with dial-up, NASA is approaching the limit of what its existing communications network can handle,” says Dave Israel, the principal investigator of the LCRD project.

He is also the leader of a vast research team, including experts at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), in Pasadena, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Lincoln Laboratory.

“This transition will take several years to complete, but the eventual payback will be very large increases in the amount of data we can transmit, both downlink and uplink, especially to distant destinations in the solar system and beyond,” James Reuther adds.

The official holds an appointment as the director of the OCT Crosscutting Technology Demonstrations Division.