NASA has announced it is building an integrated-photonics modem with a view to testing it on the International Space Station in 2020.
The project will be part of the Laser Communications Relay Demonstration (LCRD) and will use lasers to encode and transmit data at rates 10 to 100 times faster than today’s communications equipment, requiring significantly less mass and power.
The organisation hopes that such a leap in technology could deliver video and high-resolution measurements from spacecraft over planets across the solar system - permitting researchers to make detailed studies of conditions on other worlds, much as scientists today track hurricanes and other climate and environmental changes here on Earth.
“We’ve pushed this for a long time,” said Mike Krainak, who is leading the modem’s development at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland.
“The technology will simplify optical system design. It will reduce the size and power consumption of optical devices, and improve reliability, all while enabling new functions from a lower-cost system. It is clear that our strategy to leverage integrated photonic circuitry will lead to a revolution in Earth and planetary-space communications as well as in science instruments.”
Ultimately, the device, known as ILLUMA, will be roughly the size of a mobile phone, which will be achieved by squeezing all the light-related functions onto a microchip
“What we want to do is provide a faster exchange of data to the scientific community. Modems have to be inexpensive. They have to be small. We also have to keep their weight down,” Krainak said.
The goal is to develop and demonstrate the technology and then make it available to industry and other government agencies, creating an economy of scale that will further drive down costs.
Krainak sees application in data centres, where integrated photonics promises to dramatically reduce their current size while offering faster computing power.
“Google, Facebook, they’re all starting to look at this technology,” Krainak said.
“As integrated photonics progresses to be more cost effective than fibre optics, it will be used. Everything is headed this way.”
Image: NASA