NASA’s Artemis II Moon mission shows space-to-Earth laser comms can scale
Earlier this month, NASA’s Artemis II mission sent four astronauts to orbit the Moon and used new laser communications systems to beam dramatic images back to Earth. One of the receivers, though, wasn’t hosted by the US space agency. A low-cost terminal built by the companies Observable Space and Quantum Opus, and operated by the Australian National University, pulled down data broadcast from a spacecraft at the Moon at a rate of 260 megabits per second. That success proves that high-throughput connections between Earth and space can be done on the cheap, the companies say. The terminal used Observable Space’s software and telescope to capture and lock onto the transmissions from the Orion spacecraft, and a photonic sensor built by Quantum Opus to decode the data. Their terminal cost less than $5 million, compared to more bespoke solutions that cost tens of millions of dollars. NASA has been testing deep space laser communications for several years, including a demonstration of data links with a spacecraft 218 million miles from Earth on its way to an …
