Results of the optical downlink experiment KIODO from OICETS satellite to optical ground station Oberpfaffenhofen (OGS-OP)

Abstract

Optical LEO downlinks from the Japanese OICETS to the optical ground station built by the German Aerospace Center (DLR) near Munich have been performed. This was the first optical LEO downlink on European grounds. The ground station received a 50-Mbit/s OOK signal at 847 nm on its 40-cm Cassegrain telescope and sent two spatially displaced beacon beams towards OICETS. Five out of eight trials could be performed successfully while the other three were hindered by cloud blockage. A BER of 10-6 has been reached. The elevation angle above the horizon ranged between 2° and 45°. The Fried parameter and the scintillation were measured with instruments inside the ground station. The beacon power received by the LUCE Terminal onboard OICETS has also been recorded. This paper describes the setup of the experiment and highlights the results of the measurement trials.

Nanobob: a cubesat mission concept for quantum communication experiments in an uplink configuration

“…Moreover, the wavelength is retina-safe, and directly compatible with existing telecommunication hardware and infrastructure. It is also advantageous that optical communication in space has been demonstrated previously in this wavelength range [53]. We therefore aim to use the beacon lasers not only for PAT, but also for fast optical communication by implementing a pulse position modulation scheme [54].…”

Air to ground quantum key distribution

“…Initially built for high speed data communications in large area survey scenarios, it is able to provide Fast Ethernet data rates over a stable optical channel for distances of up to 120 km. Moreover, the OGS located in Oberpfaffenhofen near Munich, Germany already demonstrated laser communications with satellites in LEO [36] and a stratospheric balloon [78].…”

“…Clearly, for satellite based qkd this can only be partly representative. In classical free-space communications, however, the situation is different: High bandwidth data links between an aircraft and a ground station have been demonstrated [34,35] as well as links to and from satellites in low earth orbit (LEO) [36][37][38]. Additionally inter satellite links, both LEO-LEO and inter orbit to satellites in a geosynchronous orbit (GEO), are already developed [39] to provide high speed data backbones.…”

A review of communication-oriented optical wireless systems

“…Outdoor OW links are a high-bandwidth and lowpower-consumption alternative in satellite communications [4] and OW links have been successfully demonstrated in satellite-to-satellite, earth-to-satellite and earth-to-moving-vehicle links [188][189][190][191][192][193][194][195][196][197][198][199]. Satellite systems are the most challenging category of outdoor OW systems, because of the very long distances that the optical beams propagate through vacuum or the atmosphere.…”