For the first time, NASA has used laser communications technology to transmit 4K video feeds from an aircraft to the International Space Station (ISS) and back, an advancement that will pave the way for providing live video feeds to astronauts on the Moon during Artemis. While the US space agency has historically relied on radio waves to transmit information to and from space, this is the first time it has transmitted 4K video footage from an aircraft to the ISS and back using optical or laser communications.
Laser communication is 10 to 100 times the data of the wireless frequency system because it is transmitted using infrared light. This feat, led by the engineer team at the Glen Research Center in the Cleveland, was achieved by installing a portable laser terminal on the belly of the Pilatas PC-12 aircraft. Optical station of Cleveland, from there, the data was sent via a terrestrial network to NASA's White Sands Test Canter in Las Cruces, New Mexico, where scientists used infrared light signals to send the data, the agency said.
NASA noted that the signal travelled 22,000 miles from Earth to NASA's orbital experiment platform, the Laser Communications Experiment Demonstration (LCRD), which then transmitted the signal to the LCRD LEO Integrated User Modem and Amplifier Terminal (ILLUMA-T) satellite installed on the ISS, which transmitted the data back to Earth. The signal could penetrate cloud coverage more effectively with the help of High-Rate Delay Tolerant Networking (HDTN) -- a new system developed at Glenn.
Daniel Raible, principal investigator for the HDTN project at Glenn called it a "tremendous accomplishment". He noted that future experiments can "now build upon the success of streaming 4K HD videos to and from the space station". This will enable future capabilities, "like HD video conferencing, for our Artemis astronauts, which will be important for crew health and activity coordination", Raible said.
