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Voltaire Staff

NASA streams 4k video to space station and back


NASA has successfully tested laser communication in space by streaming 4K video footage from an aeroplane in the sky to the International Space Station and back.

 

The test was conducted by a team at NASA’s Glenn Research Center in Cleveland.


With the experiment, NASA demonstrated that it could provide live coverage of a Moon landing during its Artemis missions and could be great for the development of optical communications that would help humans connect to Mars and beyond.

 

The US space agency generally uses radio waves to share information from surface to space but laser communications using infrared light can transmit data 10 to 100 times faster than radios.

 

As part of the test, an aeroplane with a portable laser terminal was sent over Lake Erie sending data from the aircraft to an optical ground station in Cleveland. 

 

"From there, it was sent over an Earth-based network to NASA’s White Sands Test Facility in Las Cruces, New Mexico, where scientists used infrared light signals to send the data," NASA wrote.

 

The signals travelled 22,000 miles away from Earth to NASA’s Laser Communications Relay Demonstration (LCRD), an orbiting experimental platform. The LCRD then relayed them to ILLUMA-T, a payload mounted on the orbiting laboratory, which then sent data back to Earth.

 

"These experiments are a tremendous accomplishment," said Dr Daniel Raible, principal investigator for the HDTN project at Glenn.


He added, "We can now build upon the success of streaming 4K HD videos to and from the space station to provide future capabilities, like HD videoconferencing, for our Artemis astronauts, which will be important for crew health and activity coordination."


Image Source: NASA


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