TBIRD's ground station is in Table Mountain, California, and is managed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California.ĭuring TBIRD’s six-month operations, NASA and its partners will gather as much information as possible about laser communications functionality on small satellites. TBIRD’s streamlined design does not contain any moving mechanisms, so the spacecraft’s pointing ability enables the laser communications telescope’s connection from space to ground. In the course of the mission, PTD-3 will demonstrate highly stable body pointing, meaning the spacecraft can be precisely directed toward the ground station to facilitate TBIRD’s downlink demonstration. Leveraging existing components increases efficiency and creates cost savings. In addition to being on a standardized commercial spacecraft, TBIRD was also built from existing commercial, telecommunications hardware products that were modified for the extreme environment of space. This approach allows the PTD series to rapidly and affordably demonstrate new subsystem technologies for increasing small spacecraft capabilities. Terran Orbital of Irvine, California, provides the spacecraft, integrates the payload, and operates PTD missions. Each PTD mission uses the same spacecraft bus and avionics platform designs with the goal of increasing efficiency and reducing the amount of time required for mission planning and design. This step is as costly and complex as redesigning a car every time a person needs to travel. Historically, most new spacecraft missions have required custom spacecraft designs based on the requirements of their payloads. “We are pushing the envelope by increasing the pace of subsystem technology demonstrations through the innovations of our industry partners.” “Small spacecraft continue to prove themselves vital building blocks for larger, more complicated missions,” said Roger Hunter, program manager for Small Spacecraft Technology at Ames. The PTD series leverages a common commercial spacecraft to provide a robust platform for effective testing of technologies with minimal redesign in between launches. The Small Spacecraft Technology program at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California's Silicon Valley manages the PTD mission series. PTD-3’s solar arrays will provide power to TBIRD (image credits: Terran Orbital Corporation) The TBIRD system, funded by SCaN and built by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Lincoln Laboratory in Lexington, is about the size of a tissue box and is integrated into PTD-3, a CubeSat that is the size of two stacked cereal boxes.įigure 2: Pathfinder Technology Demonstrator 3 with Solar Arrays Deployed: TeraByte InfraRed Delivery (TBIRD) integrated within the PTD-3 spacecraft. “These missions will need the downlink capabilities that laser communications can provide.” “As future science instruments and imaging systems incorporate the latest technology advancements, they’ll return very large volumes of data on a daily basis,” said Jason Mitchell, Director of the Advanced Communications and Navigation Technology division within NASA’s Space Communications and Navigation ( SCaN) program. The addition of laser communications to spacecraft is similar to switching from dial-up to high-speed internet. With a single seven-minute pass at 200 Gbit/s, TBIRD will send back terabytes of data and give NASA more insight into the capabilities of laser communications. “TBIRD is a game changer and will be very important for future human exploration and science missions.” said Andreas Doulaveris, TBIRD’s mission systems engineer at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. Laser communications substantially increases data transport capabilities, offering higher data rates and more information packed into a single transmission. With more data, researchers can make profound discoveries. NASA primarily uses radio frequency to communicate with spacecraft, but with sights set on human exploration of the Moon and Mars and the development of enhanced scientific instruments, NASA needs more efficient communications systems to transmit significant amounts of data. (Not drawn to scale), image credits: NASA/Dave Ryan Figure 1: Illustration of TBIRD downlinking data over lasers links to Optical Ground Station 1 in California.
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