A Day in the Life of the Laser Communications Relay Demonstration Project

Abstract

This paper provides an overview of the planned concept of operations for the Laser Communications Relay Demonstration Project (LCRD), a joint project among NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC), the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology (JPL), and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Lincoln Laboratory (MIT/LL). LCRD will provide at least two years of bi-directional optical communications at user data rates of up to 1.244 Gbps in an operational environment. The project lays the groundwork for establishing communications architecture and protocols, and developing the communications hardware and support infrastructure, concluding in a demonstration of optical communications' potential to meet NASA's growing need for higher data rates for future science and exploration missions. A pair of flight optical communications terminals will reside on a single commercial communications satellite in geostationary orbit; the two ground optical communications terminals will be located in Southern California and Hawaii. This paper summarizes the current LCRD architecture and key systems for the demonstration, focusing on what it will take to operate an optical communications relay that can support space-to-space, space-to-air, and space-to-ground optical links.

LEO-to-ground optical communications using SOTA (Small Optical TrAnsponder) – Payload verification results and experiments on space quantum communications

“…Lasercom demonstrations have been carried out in a wide variety of scenarios, e.g. deep space-to-ground [2], ground-to-deep space [3], LEO-to-ground [4] [5], LEO-to-LEO [6], GEO-to-ground [7] [8], GEO-to-LEO [9][10], GEO-to-aircraft [11], aircraft-to-ground [12] [13], aircraft-to-aircraft [14] and balloon-to-balloon [15], and a number of projects are projected for future demonstrations [16] [17] [18] [19] [20] [21].…”

Update on NASA’s Laser Communications Relay Demonstration Project

“…With two ground stations, NASA could simulate a handover from one ground station to another; in a different configuration, one ground station could act as the user and the other could act as the "receiving" ground station (i.e. as the optical trunkline from the relay satellite) [6].…”

Laser Communications Relay Demonstration (LCRD) update and the path towards optical relay operations

“…In the original design, the LCRD baseline contained only two optical space terminals and two optical ground stations, with one station acting as the user and one station receiving the optical trunkline [2]. This would allow LCRD to simulate an optical to optical relay prior to the launch of an orbiting relay.…”