Space Photonics Technology

This proposal offers an innovative laser communication system architecture allowing free space optical communications at high data rates in a way that is compact, light-weight, robust, vibration-tolerant, inexpensive, and eye-safe to be suitable for long range space-based applications. The proposed Scale Phase-locked Adaptive Communication Element (SPACE) laser communications system replaces conventional laser communication transceivers with a sparse array of synchronously-operated small-size adaptive laser communication (ALC) nodes. Each ALC node of the sparse array represents a fiber collimator in which precision adaptive beam pointing, beam tracking, and wavefront phase distortion correction capabilities are combined into a structurally integrated architecture without additional external wavefront control sub-systems. Each ALC node is capable for receiving and transmitting a laser communication signal compliant with SONET OC-48 wavelength grid and supporting from 4 to 64 channels at 2.5 Gb/s data traffic per channel with potential transitioning to OC-192 (10 Gb/s) standard rate. In the proposed innovative long-range laser communication system architecture the adaptive fiber-collimators play a"building block"role. These laser communication building blocks can be assembled into the SPACE system with different modular architectures to meet the specific requirements of various ballistic missile defense missions.