Nanosatellite optical downlink experiment: design, simulation, and prototyping
Name
Clements-2016-Nanosatellite optical downlink e.pdf
Size
4.22 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
5ea3596696d6c2bde9ee4de1e84a7fb8
Author(s)
Clements, Emily B
Aniceto, Raichelle J.
Barnes, Derek C.
Caplan, David O.
Clark, James R.
Del Portillo Barrios, Inigo
Haughwout, Christian Alexander
Khatsenko, Maxim Oleg
Lee, Myron
Morgan, Rachel E.
Date Issued
September 2016
Journal
Optical Engineering
Publisher
SPIE
Citation
Clements, Emily et al. “Nanosatellite Optical Downlink Experiment: Design, Simulation, and Prototyping.” Optical Engineering 55.11 (2016): 111610.
Version
Final published version
Abstract
The nanosatellite optical downlink experiment (NODE) implements a free-space optical communications (lasercom) capability on a CubeSat platform that can support low earth orbit (LEO) to ground downlink rates>10 Mbps. A primary goal of NODE is to leverage commercially available technologies to provide a scalable and cost-effective alternative to radio-frequency-based communications. The NODE transmitter uses a 200-mW 1550-nm master-oscillator power-amplifier design using power-efficient M-ary pulse position modulation. To facilitate pointing the 0.12-deg downlink beam, NODE augments spacecraft body pointing with a microelectromechanical fast steering mirror (FSM) and uses an 850-nm uplink beacon to an onboard CCD camera. The 30-cm aperture ground telescope uses an infrared camera and FSM for tracking to an avalanche photodiode detector-based receiver. Here, we describe our approach to transition prototype transmitter and receiver designs to a full end-to-end CubeSat-scale system. This includes link budget refinement, drive electronics miniaturization, packaging reduction, improvements to pointing and attitude estimation, implementation of modulation, coding, and interleaving, and ground station receiver design. We capture trades and technology development needs and outline plans for integrated system ground testing.
MIT Department
Lincoln Laboratory
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Mechanical Engineering
Terms of Use
Article is made available in accordance with the publisher's policy and may be subject to US copyright law. Please refer to the publisher's site for terms of use.
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1117/1.OE.55.11.111610
