The Low-Cost Optical Terminal, or LCOT, at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, was able to send its first laser communications uplink to the agency’s recently concluded TeraByte Infrared Delivery, or T-Bird, mission in low Earth orbit.
LCOT is geared toward cutting laser communications technology cost through its use of slightly modified commercial hardware, NASA said Wednesday.
Fibertek, a fiber optic product supplier, provided NASA with a laser technology that was integrated into the LCOT at Goddard.
NASA noted that LCOT’s first live uplink test delivered sufficient intensity for over three minutes of connection to the tissue box-sized T-Bird, one of the payloads of the CubeSat called Pathfinder Technology Demonstrator-3.
The three-minute LCOT connection to T-Bird would suffice to draw more than five terabytes of data equal to over 2,500 hours high-definition video in one pass, the agency added. Laser communications’ ultra-high-speed transmission makes it possible for future science missions to farther destinations to maintain their Earth connection.
Through its Space Communications and Navigation program, NASA is pursuing laser communications technology development in various orbits, including the forthcoming Artemis II mission.
