Description
Recent spaceflight missions such as NASA's Artemis program have heralded a renewed interest in lunar scientific research and exploration. To facilitate these activities, near-future lunar missions will require several times more bandwidth than is currently provided by traditional radio frequency (RF) communications. Free space optical communications (FSOC) presents itself as a viable alternative, which is capable of multi-gigabit data transfer rates over cislunar space. NASA's 2013 Lunar Laser Communication Demonstration (LLCD) and 2026 Optical to Orion (O2O) missions have demonstrated the feasibility of FSOC for lunar missions. These missions have demonstrated the clear advantages optical communications can provide to cutting-edge lunar research, including simultaneous downlink of several high-definition live video feeds.
This study proposes a Modular Optical Cislunar High-speed (MOCHi) network of satellite platforms throughout cislunar space to support the next generation of high-bandwidth communications systems. This network aims to provide the backbone of optical communications in cislunar space, facilitating high-speed lunar communications for research and commercial applications. Simulations are conducted and compared to historical FSOC missions to verify the feasibility and performance that a cislunar relay network would provide for optical communications. Further simulations are conducted to examine the extent to which transmission through the Earth's atmospheric channel adversely impacts optical fibre coupling efficiency for downlink and uplink cases. This enables detailed link budgets to be constructed for each node in the relay network, and for specific end-to-end cases. Contact plans are hence outlined to optimise the network for specific goals and applications. Hybrid FSOC/RF solutions are considered for small platforms such as lunar rovers to extend support to all wireless lunar communications demands.
| I am the presenting author | Yes |
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