The Small Spacecraft Technology program at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley manages the PTD mission series. The TBIRD system, funded by SCaN and built by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Lincoln Laboratory in Lexington, is about the size of a tissue box and is integrated into PTD-3, a CubeSat that is the size of two stacked cereal boxes. “These missions will need the downlink capabilities that laser communications can provide.” “As future science instruments and imaging systems incorporate the latest technology advancements, they’ll return very large volumes of data on a daily basis,” said Jason Mitchell, Director of the Advanced Communications and Navigation Technology division within NASA’s Space Communications and Navigation (SCaN) program. The addition of laser communications to spacecraft is similar to switching from dial-up to high-speed internet. With a single seven-minute pass at 200 Gbps, TBIRD will send back terabytes of data and give NASA more insight into the capabilities of laser communications. “TBIRD is a game changer and will be very important for future human exploration and science missions.” said Andreas Doulaveris, TBIRD’s mission systems engineer at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. Laser communications substantially increases data transport capabilities, offering higher data rates and more information packed into a single transmission. With more data, researchers can make profound discoveries. NASA primarily uses radio frequency to communicate with spacecraft, but with sights set on human exploration of the Moon and Mars and the development of enhanced scientific instruments, NASA needs more efficient communications systems to transmit significant amounts of data. At 200 gigabits per second (Gbps), TBIRD will downlink data at the highest optical rate ever achieved by NASA. TBIRD will showcase the high-data-rate capabilities of laser communications from a CubeSat in low-Earth orbit.
The Pathfinder Technology Demonstrator 3 (PTD-3) mission, carrying the TeraByte InfraRed Delivery (TBIRD) system, will debut on May 25 as part of SpaceX’s Transporter-5 rideshare launch.
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