Science Daily November 9, 2022
While enabling orders-of-magnitude gains in data rates, optical signals impose much stricter pointing requirements and are strongly affected by atmospheric turbulence. Researchers in Australia established a coherent 1550 nm link across turbulent atmosphere between a deployable optical terminal and a drone-mounted retroreflector. Through 10 Hz machine vision optical tracking with nested 200 Hz tip/tilt adaptive optics stabilisation, they corrected for pointing errors and atmospheric turbulence to maintain robust single mode fiber coupling, resulting in an uninterrupted 100 Gbps optical data link while tracking at angular rates of up to 1.5 deg/s, equivalent to that of spacecraft in low earth orbit. They have demonstrated greater data capacity of coherent communications and compatibility with extant fiber-based technologies across static links. Ground-to-low earth orbit links of Terabits per second can ultimately be achieved with capable ground stations…read more. Open Access TECHNICAL ARTICLEÂ
Schematic of the deployable optical terminal and experiment… Credit: Scientific Reports volume 12, Article number: 18345 (2022)Â