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IPFS News Link • Military

Army will use lasers to cubesats for 50 times faster communication

• nextbigfuture.com by brian wang

This is 50 times better than 2 megabit per second radio communication to cubesats that are currently used.

Optical Communications and Sensor Demonstration (OCSD) CubeSat could be improved to 2.5 gigabits per second with relatively simple upgrades to the attitude control system and a few other systems. This would open the possibility of using small satellites in applications, such as synthetic aperture radar or hyperspectral Earth imaging, that produce volumes of data far beyond the capacity of radio-frequency downlink systems. It is also possible to use these satellites as data relay nodes in low-Earth orbit. Having several small satellites has the potential to provide low-latency, high-rate communications as a service for other satellites in orbit around Earth.