NASA has announced it has successfully streamed 4K video from an aircraft to the ISS and back via laser communications.
In a series of tests, a team from the agency’s Glenn Research Center modified a Pilatus PC12 aircraft to carry a portable laser terminal. Flying over Lake Erie, the plane sent data to a ground-based station in Cleveland for onward transmission to the White Sands Test Facility in New Mexico, from where it was sent using infrared light signals to NASA’s orbiting Laser Communications Relay Demonstration (LCRD), 22,000 miles away from Earth.
The LCRD relayed the data to the ILLUMA-T (Integrated LCRD LEO User Modem and Amplifier Terminal) aboard the International Space Station, said NASA.
The process, a first for the agency, enables 10 to 100 times more data faster than conventional radio signals and it is hoped the technology will provide live coverage of astronauts on the lunar surface during NASA’s planned Artemis missions. A new system developed by researchers at Glenn, High-Rate Delay Tolerant Networking (HDTN), allowed the signals to effectively penetrate cloud coverage during the tests.
Dr Daniel Rable, principal investigator for the HDTN project at Glenn, said: “These experiments are a tremendous accomplishment. We can now build upon the success of streaming 4K HD videos to and from the space station to provide future capabilities, like HD videoconferencing, for our Artemis astronauts, which will be important for crew health and activity coordination.”
