NASA’s Artemis II moon mission shows laser-to-Earth laser comms can scale

Earlier this month, NASA’s Artemis II mission sent four astronauts to orbit the moon and use new laser communication techniques to project stunning images of Earth.

One of the receivers, however, did not belong to the US space agency. A low-cost site created by companies Visual Areas and Quantum Opus, and operated by the Australian National University, downloaded data broadcast from space on the moon at a rate of 260 megabits per second.

That success proves that high-quality communication between Earth and space can be done at a low cost, the companies say.

The center used software and the Observable Space telescope to capture and record transmissions from the Orion spacecraft, as well as an imaging sensor developed by Quantum Opus to collect data. Their terminals cost less than $5 million, compared to more multi-million dollar solutions.

NASA has been trying to communicate with lasers in space for several years, including a demonstration of data links with a spacecraft 218 million miles from Earth on its way to an asteroid. Artemis II was its most comprehensive demonstration: NASA’s massive receivers in California and New Mexico, as well as a low-cost test site in Australia, all captured 4K video from the lunar orbit.

Although laser communications boast a higher frequency than radio, which remains the main form of communication in the air, lasers are vulnerable to interference due to clouds, and must be in line with the target location – which is why it is important to have a reception station on the other side of the country from the US.

Josh Cassada, the former US astronomer who co-founded Quantum Opus, also claimed that Australia was the first continent to appear in the first Earthrise image taken by the Artemis II astronauts.

Observable Space CEO Dan Roelker said the project proves that laser-to-Earth laser downlinks are ready for expansion. It has been widely used for satellite-to-satellite communication, this technology has never been used for terrestrial retransmission due to its cost, but now sees a global network of these terminals to receive data sent from satellites of all kinds.

“We’re likely to do this in the next year or so,” Roelker told TechCrunch, though he said the company isn’t ready to reveal the details of what’s left.

“We’re going to collaborate with a lot of people around this,” he said, “whether we do it ourselves, or we collaborate with other cloud-as-a-service companies, or we work with big group providers who want to have their own equipment.