Publication Date:
2019-07-13
Description:
The Laser Communication Relay Demonstration is NASAs multi-year demonstration of laser communication to a geosynchronous satellite. We are currently assembling the optical system for the first of the two baseline ground stations. The optical system consists of an adaptive optics system, the transmit system and a camera for target acquisition. The adaptive optics system is responsible for compensating the downlink beam for atmospheric turbulence and coupling it into the modems single mode fiber. The adaptive optics system is a woofer/tweeter design, with one deformable mirror correcting for low spatial frequencies with large amplitude and a second deformable mirror correcting for high spatial frequencies with small amplitude. The system uses a Shack-Hartmann wavefront sensor. The transmit system relays four beacon beams and one communication laser to the telescope for propagation to the space terminal. Both the uplink and downlink beams are centered at 1.55 microns. We present an overview of the design of the system as well as performance predictions including time series of coupling efficiency and expected uplink beam quality.
Keywords:
Space Communications, Spacecraft Communications, Command and Tracking
Type:
JPL-CL-16-3799
,
SPIE Optics and Photonics; Aug 28, 2016 - Sep 01, 2016; San Diego, CA; United States
Format:
text
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