| ▲ | World-first gigabit laser link between aircraft and geostationary satellite(esa.int) |
| 62 points by giuliomagnifico 4 days ago | 23 comments |
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| ▲ | db48x an hour ago | parent | next [-] |
| Some miniaturization required. |
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| ▲ | Meneth 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| "low-latency links", says the article. I wonder if they consider 500 ms ping to be low, or if they want to replace Geostationary with Low Earth Orbit. |
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| ▲ | fidotron 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | Getting it to work with one end stationary first sounds like a reasonable development plan. LEO adds a lot of complexity, but with huge benefits. OTOH the number of engineers that focus on throughput over latency is quite staggering. | | |
| ▲ | IrishTechie 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | I guess if your goal is just to stream aircraft telemetry and black box like recordings then latency may not be high on the agenda. | | |
| ▲ | SiempreViernes an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | I think it's the opposite? For small telemetry you want it now, but for the big data products there's no hope of "now" and so you settle for soon. | |
| ▲ | connicpu 27 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] | | Black box data doesn't need that crazy throughput either though. Traditional RF is much easier to get right, and works even when the aircraft starts losing track of where it is and stops being able to track the satellite with its laser |
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| ▲ | utopiah 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Nice, if you want a bit more details on the TNO side https://www.tno.nl/en/newsroom/2026/02/airbus-tno-demonstrat... relying on https://connectivity.esa.int/archives/projects/ultraair |
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| ▲ | cm2187 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| But that means you need to have a different laser pointed at every single individual aircraft right? Doesn’t really scale. |
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| ▲ | eqvinox 13 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | You can probably do phased arrays. (It might already be a phased array.) | | | |
| ▲ | amelius 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I suppose you can do time-sharing. And use mems-mirrors to quickly move the beam between different targets. | | | |
| ▲ | voidUpdate 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | If starlink satellites get laser downlink, it might work :P |
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| ▲ | myrmidon 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I'm really curious how the tracking works in such a system, and how "bad" the beam spread is (my impression is that from the diffraction limit alone the beam has to be spread over at least a ~10m radius after travelling 36000km). Some info on the laser itself would also be very interesting (power? wavelength?). Really cool project though! |
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| ▲ | amelius 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > and how "bad" the beam spread is The spread makes the tracking easier, I suppose. | | |
| ▲ | TimorousBestie an hour ago | parent [-] | | Perhaps a little, however. Different paths through the atmosphere will perturb the phase of the signal; depending on conditions not all of that ~10m beam width is going to decode with an acceptable bit error rate. |
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| ▲ | mytailorisrich an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | Tracking and actuation is nothing new or particularly challenging, IMHO. It's the laser/optical part combined with throughput at that distance that is the main area of R&D, I think. |
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| ▲ | xnx 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| Impressive! I believe round trip latency would be 0.5 seconds. |
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| ▲ | 1e1a 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | That's ~162.5 MB in transit at any time | | |
| ▲ | kevincox 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Excellent for pingfs (https://github.com/yarrick/pingfs) | |
| ▲ | htgb 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Shouldn't it be 1000/16 = 62.5? Impressive nonetheless, of course! | | |
| ▲ | 1e1a 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | The article says 2.6 gigabits/second which is 2,600,000,000 bits/second, 2,600,000,000b/s * 0.5s / 8 is 162,500,000 bytes, 162,500,000 / 1,000,000 is 162.5 megabytes |
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| ▲ | zppln 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Weird. |
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