The CubeSat Laser Infrared CrosslinK Mission (CLICK)
Name
111800Y.pdf
Description
Published version
Size
1.71 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
f476d42c1aced48f3852094ce8efc48d
Author(s)
Cahoy, Kerri
Grenfell, Peter
Crews, Angela
Long, Michael
Serra, Paul
Nguyen, Anh
Fitzgerald, Riley
Haughwout, Christian
Diez, Rodrigo
Aguilar, Alexa
Date Issued
July 12, 2019
Publisher
SPIE
Citation
Cahoy, Kerri, Grenfell, Peter, Crews, Angela, Long, Michael, Serra, Paul et al. 2019. "The CubeSat Laser Infrared CrosslinK Mission (CLICK)."
Version
Final published version
Abstract
© COPYRIGHT SPIE. The CubeSat Laser Infrared CrosslinK mission is a joint Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), University of Florida (UF), and NASA Ames Research Center effort to develop laser communications (lasercom) transceivers. The terminals demonstrate full-duplex intersatellite communications and ranging capability using commercial components to enable future large constellations or swarms of nanosatellites as coordinated distributed sensor systems. CLICK will demonstrate a crosslink between two CubeSats that each host a < 2U lasercom payload. Range control is achieved using differential drag in Low Earth Orbit (LEO), with attitude controlled using a three-axis reaction wheel assembly and attitude sensors, including star trackers. The lasercom terminals are direct-detect and rate scalable, designed to achieve a 20 Mbps crosslink at ranges from 25 km to 580 km and operate full-duplex at 1537 nm and 1563 nm with 200 mW of transmit power and a 14.6 arcscecond (0.07 milliradian) full width half max (FWHM) beamwidth. The terminals also use a 976 nm, 500 mW, 0.75 degree FWHM beacon and a quadcell for initial acquisition, and a low-rate radio crosslink for exchanging orbit information. The payload transmitter is a master oscillator power amplifier (MOPA) with fiber Bragg grating for pulse shaping and MEMS fast steering mirror (FSM) for fine pointing, modeled after the MIT Nanosatellite Optical Downlink Experiment. The transceiver leverages UF's Miniature Optical Communications Transmitter (MOCT) including a chip-scale atomic clock (CSAC). The receiver implements both a time to digital converter (TDC) as well as pulse recovery and matched filtering for precision ranging.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics
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.
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2535953
