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Near-Real-Time Data Transfer from Space

In Toulouse, France, at the Airbus Defense & Space facilities, European Space Agency (ESA) engineers and technicians are performing the final tests on Eutelsat's EB9B telecommunications satellite and its hosted payloads EDRS-A and the Italian space agency ASI's Opportunity Payload. EDRS stands for European Data Relay System and has been designed to provide Europe with a fast and reliable extension to its telecommunications network. EDRS-A is the first of two EDRS nodes and it will be launched on-board the Eutelsat satellite from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan in 2015. Like optical fiber on Earth, the EDRS system, which is also referred to as SpaceDataHighway, will provide laser communications in space with data rates of up to 1.8 gigabits per second. The SpaceDataHighway will provide near-real-time data transfer from Earth observation satellites, drones, or aircrafts to Earth via geostationary communication satellites. It will be able to download faster, with shorter latency and in a secure way, larger volumes of image data, helping to improve environmental and security monitoring, disaster response, and crisis management.

Topics:
Aerospace Data Acquisition Data Acquisition Lasers & Laser Systems Photonics RF & Microwave Electronics

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    Transcript

    00:00:02 [Music] this is uat's e9b a new telecommunication satellite undergoing final preparations at airbus's clean room in tulus almost half of the satellite is composed of a big payload called EDSA edrs or the European data relay system is designed to transmit data to the ground from low Earth orbiting

    00:00:33 satellites such as those used for Earth observation or the International Space Station edrs is comprised of two space nodes edrs A and edrs C both in geostationary orbit and utilizing a laser link to communicate with other satellites in low earth orbits edrs essentially has two advantages over conventional data relay systems the first one is that through the use of the

    00:00:57 laser high-speed link it facilitates transfer of very high amounts of data in very short periods of time the second Advantage is that because it sits in a geostationary position overseeing the whole earth and low Orting satellites orbit entirely it has almost permanent contact to the low Orting satellite and therefore facilitates data transfer at any point in time and in near real time

    00:01:20 to the ground without edrs low Earth orbiting satellites are only able to make contact with their ground stations a few times a day and for a very limited period of time Time by relaying their data via laser link to edrs the information can be sent to users on the ground almost continuously what we also have is a feature that enables a user on the ground to send telecommands via our

    00:01:44 system to their own satellite the advantage there is that when their own satellite is out of visibility of their own ground stations they can still command their satellite possibly task them with taking new images or do whatever they wish through our system and that is called Fast Forward tasking by offering this kind of flexibility edrs can play a crucial role in relaying

    00:02:04 data during times of Crisis for instance satellite imagery might be required to protect people or assets on the ground when disaster strikes in these situations the real-time data provided by edrs could prove extremely valuable this Innovative system is the result of a public private partnership between EA and Aus relying on the combined strength of both public and Commercial Partners

    00:02:29 RS is build on a very Innovative technology which is a laser communication technology at the same time edrs purpose is to uh allow the emergence of a new market which is a market of relay Services thus this ambitious program carries both technical risk and Commercial risks the role of Visa in programs such as edrs is really to

    00:02:55 alleviate uh most of the technical risks whilst the role of the private partner is to carries most of the commercial risks edrs Commercial Services will start in 2015 after the launch of the first node EDSA with the system becoming the first fully commercial laser link based data relay service in the world for eer edrs is the first step towards the creation

    00:03:21 of worldwide data relay Services called globet [Music]