Chinese satellite company Chang Guang Satellite Technology (CGST) successfully tested data transfer from an orbital satellite to a mobile ground station using ultra-high laser communication, marking an important step towards the commercial application of this technology, according to a report by the South China Morning Post here.
CGST, in control of the world’s largest satellite constellation JILIN-1, transmitted images from one of its 108 JILIN-1 satellites to an optical telescope mounted on a vehicle at a rate of 10 gigabytes per second. The mobile station has high throughput and can be deployed anywhere to avoid adverse weather conditions or cloudiness.
“The data transfer speed in this test reached 10 gigabytes per second, which is 10 times higher than the speed of radio frequency ties traditionally used for satellite communication,” said CGST technical director Van Sinsin.
In the future, CGST plans to further enhance the throughput to 40-100 Gbit/s and deploy these stations in various regions of the country to improve image efficiency.
However, the company did not disclose specific details about the configuration of the ground station, including the telescope’s characteristics or the type of vehicle utilized.
In a similar test conducted in June, CGST collaborated with the Aerospace Research Institute of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. This marked the first commercial use of such testing in China.
CGST plans to expand the JILIN-1 constellation to 300 satellites in low-Earth orbit by 2025.
Many space agencies and the US military are also developing laser communication systems. NASA and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, for instance, presented the TERABYTE Infrand Delivery system earlier this year, which achieved a data transfer speed of 200 Gbit/s.