NASA has achieved a groundbreaking milestone by using laser communication technology to transmit 4K video streams between an aircraft and the International Space Station (ISS). This technological advancement is expected to pave the way for live video coverage of astronauts on the Moon during the Artemis missions.
While the US space agency has historically relied on radio waves to send information to and from space, it is the new tech which has been used for the first time. The company will stream 4K video footage from an aircraft to the ISS and it will be backed by using optical or laser communications.
Laser communications
Laser communications are 10 to 100 times more data faster than radio frequency systems, as they use infrared light to transmit.
Led by a team of engineers at NASA's Glenn Research Center in Cleveland, the feat was achieved by installing a portable laser terminal on the belly of a Pilatus PC-12 aircraft, which flew over Lake Erie and sent data from the aircraft to an optical ground station in Cleveland.
From there, it was sent over an Earth-based network to NASA's White Sands Test Facility in Las Cruces, New Mexico, where scientists used infrared light signals to send the data, the agency said.
Earth to NASA's Laser Communications Relay Demonstration
NASA noted that the signals travelled 22,000 miles away from Earth to NASA's Laser Communications Relay Demonstration (LCRD), an orbiting experimental platform.
The LCRD then relayed the signals to the Integrated LCRD LEO User Modem and Amplifier Terminal (ILLUMA-T) satellite that was mounted on the ISS, which then sent data back to Earth.
The signal could penetrate cloud coverage more effectively with the help of High-Rate Delay Tolerant Networking (HDTN) -- a new system developed at Glenn.
Daniel Raible, principal investigator for the HDTN project at Glenn called it a "tremendous accomplishment".
He noted that future experiments can "now build upon the success of streaming 4K HD videos to and from the space station".
This will enable future capabilities, "like HD video conferencing, for our Artemis astronauts, which will be important for crew health and activity coordination", Raible said.
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