PRESENT AND FUTURE ACTIVITIES IN OPTICAL SPACE COMMUNICATIONS AT ATR

In ATR, we have been conducting research on an optical inter-satellite link(ISL), focusing on a high-power transmitter and precise optical beam control technologies, both of which play a very important role in the optical ISL systems. This paper describes current optical ISL research at ATR: development of an intensity modulatioddirect detection(IM/DD) modem, LD amplifier experiments, development of a free-space simulator for laser transmission and evaluation of pointing/tracking parameters for various orbit configurations. The evaluations show that a system in a low earth orbit(LE0) satellite tracking a target in geostationary orbit(GE0) will be simplified when a particular gimbal axis configuration is selected.

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