NASA intends to advance space laser communications and Earth atmospheric monitoring with new science and technology endeavors in an upcoming payload resupply mission to the International Space Station (ISS).
The launch of crew supplies, food and equipment along with research and technology experiments and development hardware will take place no earlier than Nov. 5 on a Falcon 9 rocket from Kennedy Space Center in the agency’s 29th SpaceX-contracted Dragon mission.
Developed for installation on the ISS U.S. segment’s exterior, NASA’s ILLUMA-T terminal investigation is to provide the next milestone in establishing an enhanced data communications capability using infrared wavelengths for two- way laser communications over the agency’s Laser Communications Relay Demonstration System (LCRD). The system includes satellite relay assets in place in geosynchronous orbit over the Pacific Ocean and ground stations in Haleakala, Hawaii, and Table Mountain, California.
Once installed, the refrigerator-sized terminal will be activated to demonstrate for the first time a laser data relay capability from the ISS using the LCRD geosynchronous orbit and the ground station components. This will potentially establish a transmission rate of 1,244 gigabytes per second based on previous testing without the ISS’s involvement and much greater than current radio frequency communications using NASA’s Tracking and Data Relay satellite network, said Glenn Jackson, the acting ILLUMA-T project manager at NASA’s Glenn Research Center. Jackson spoke at an Oct. 26 prelaunch science and technology-focused news briefing.
Once ILLUMA-T is in operations, NASA plans to supplement current radio frequency communications as it works to develop smaller, lighter-weight, date transmission capabilities that cost less to launch and use less power for terminals placed in cislunar, lunar and Mars orbits.
“In order to show that and verify that entire architecture, you need to have a space user, and ILLUMA-T to the ISS is the perfect way to do that,” Jason Mitchell, director of the Advanced Communications and Navigation Technologies Division of NASA’s Space Communication and Navigation (SCaN) program, told the briefing.
“Integrating that into the human spaceflight architecture to understand what are the impacts of operating something like this—this high-data-rate capability on human spaceflight and to get us thinking how we might use it and leverage it in the future—are things we really don’t know until we really start to try it out,” Mitchell said.
The SpaceX-launched Atmospheric Wave Experiment (AWE) is also to be installed on the exterior of the ISS for infrared imaging and characterization of atmospheric gravity waves. The waves roll off mountains, convective storms and other weather systems to move through the Earth’s atmosphere, rising and falling as they transport energy and momentum that play a role in climate definition.
Relatively small as they emerge, the waves are amplified at altitude and could unveil climate changes not readily observable at low altitudes, said Jeff Forbes, a University of Colorado Boulder AWE co-investigator.
AWE is to make the first observations of the gravity waves as they transition from the upper atmosphere to space, where their variability can interfere with radio wave propagation that affects communications, navigation and tracking systems.