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NASA uses laser technology to stream 4K video to the International Space Station and back

According to NASA, the feat was accomplished by a team at its Glenn Research Center in Cleveland. It was part of a series of tests on new technology that could provide live video coverage of astronauts on the moon during the Artemis missions.

The NASA blog further states that NASA has historically relied on radio waves to send information to and from space. However, laser communications use infrared light to transmit 10 to 100 times more data faster than radio frequency systems.

The blog further reported that engineers from the Glenn Research Center, in collaboration with the Air Force Research Laboratory and NASA’s Small Business Innovation Research program, temporarily installed a portable laser terminal on the belly of a Pilatus PC-12 aircraft. They then flew over Lake Erie, transmitting data from the aircraft to an optical ground station in Cleveland. From there, the data was sent via a ground-based network to NASA’s White Sands Test Facility in Las Cruces, New Mexico, where scientists used infrared light signals to transmit the data.

The signals traveled 22,000 miles from Earth to NASA’s Laser Communications Relay Demonstration (LCRD), an experimental platform in orbit. The LCRD then relayed the signals to the ILLUMA-T (Integrated LCRD LEO User Modem and Amplifier Terminal) payload mounted on the orbiting laboratory, which then relayed data back to Earth. During the experiments, High-Rate Delay Tolerant Networking (HDTN), a new system developed at Glenn, helped the signal penetrate cloud cover more effectively, the blog added.

“We can now build on the success of streaming 4K HD video to and from the space station to provide future capabilities, such as HD videoconferencing, to our Artemis astronauts, which will be important for crew health and coordination of activities,” said Dr. Daniel Raible, principal investigator for the HDTN project at Glenn.

James Demers, Glenn’s chief aircraft operations officer, added: “Teams at Glenn ensure that new ideas don’t just sit in a lab, but are actually used in the relevant environment to ensure that this technology can be developed to improve the lives of all of us.”

As NASA continues to develop advanced scientific instruments to capture high-definition data on the moon and beyond, the agency’s Space Communications and Navigation (SCaN) program is using new technologies, such as laser communications, to beam large amounts of information back to Earth.

Published July 27, 2024, 10:16 AM IST