NASA wants to use a laser in space to speed up communications.
The Laser Communications Relay Demonstration is ready for launch no earlier than December 4. The Department of Defense's Space Test Program Satellite 6 (STPSat-6) mission will be carried out on a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket.
The launch of the mission was delayed due to a number of issues. The Artemis human moon-landing program, which plans to put boots on the moon in 2025, will benefit from the timing of the mission.
Badri Younes, deputy associate administrator of NASA's Space Communications and navigation program, told reporters of the laser demonstration during a teleconference Tuesday.
The dial-up space communications system gets a high-speed upgrade.
The agency says lasers will allow 10 to 100 times more data sent back to Earth than using radio frequencies, which will meet a growing appetite for NASA and commercial information from space. The agency and the commercial sector are planning many missions to the moon in the 2020s using Artemis, the planned Gateway space station and the Commercial Lunar Payload Services program.
The overcrowding problem that is afflicting the radiofrequency spectrum has accelerated due to growing megaconstellations of satellites in low Earth orbit and companies often file regulatory challenges concerning each other's spectrum.
The demonstration won't go as far as the moon, but it will be able to test out laser communications for at least two years. NASA has been testing laser technology in recent years and is hoping to use it for astronauts eventually.
The most famous of these missions took place in 2013, when the lunar laser communications demonstration broke speed records by sending data back from the moon at 600 megabits a second. LADEE spent seven months studying lunar dust before it was crashed into the surface.
The new mission will be much longer than other successful brief efforts that zapped broadband speeds, such as the four-month International Space Station's Optical Payload for Lasercomm Science (OPALS) experiment in 2014).
The new system will provide higher data transmission rates, but will also improve the size, weight and power of the system. It'll be smaller and volume, weigh less and use less power than current state of the art, according to the director of technology demonstrations at NASA.
It was not an easy journey to get to launch day. The laser demonstrator was supposed to launch on a commercial communications satellite. The mission was facing a lot of challenges by next year.
The GAO warned the mission had to change its design, schedule and planned host spacecraft due to "scope changes as well as funding shortfalls in prior years."
The satellite has optical laser heads. The image is from NASA Goddard.
Dave Israel, the experiment's principal investigator at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, said during the press conference that the experiment had a certain set of mission requirements.
"Then we added more requirements to our payloads that would allow more experiments," Israel said. We were no longer able to be accommodated on that platform.
A new Government Accountability Office (GAO) report states that a contractor has experienced technical challenges that have delayed the launch of one of the non-NASA payloads until at least August 2020.
The coronaviruses epidemic broke out in March 2020 and caused supply chain issues that still persist today. NASA officials said during Monday's press conference that there were new requirements associated with moving to a U.S. Space Force-hosted payload. No single issue led to the long delay.
An artist's impression of NASA's Laser Communications Relay Demonstration mission communicating data from the International Space Station to Earth. Dave Ryan is from NASA.
The huge growth in the Starlink constellation, which began testing its own laser communications system between satellites in January, was a side effect of the wait. NASA officials said in the conference that the Starlink terminals are incompatible, so there will be no zapping between systems.
Soon, more laser work will come from NASA. The Artemis 2 crewed moon-orbiting mission is expected to test an optical communications system to send high-definition video feedback to Earth. The Apollo 8 Christmas broadcast used a black-and-white television camera that could send back 10 frames per second.
During the first year of the Psyche mission, laser communications will move further out in the solar system. After the mission launch in 2022, investigators will have a year to test the Deep Space Optical Communications payload. NASA said that it will help figure out issues such as "extreme distance pointing" from deep space.
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