The Lunar Laser OCTL Terminal (LLOT)

The NASA owned Optical Communication Telescope Laboratory (OCTL) telescope located at Table Mountain, CA is being readied as a backup ground station for the upcoming Lunar Laser Communications Demonstration (LLCD). The backup ground terminal is called the Lunar Laser OCTL Terminal (LLOT). The 1-m diameter telescope will be configured as a mono-static transceiver for transmitting a laser beacon and receiving downlink at a data-rate of 39 Mb/s. Interfaces to an operations center with near-real time exchange of monitored data at OCTL will also be developed. A system level overview of this backup ground station for LLCD will be presented.

[1]  Christopher I. Moore,et al.  Large diameter high-speed InGaAs receivers for free-space lasercom , 2007, SPIE Defense + Commercial Sensing.

[2]  Kenneth A. Costello,et al.  Photon counting III-V hybrid photomultipliers using transmission mode photocathodes , 1997 .

[3]  W. Thomas Roberts,et al.  The Lunar Laser OCTL Terminal (LLOT) optical systems , 2013, Photonics West - Lasers and Applications in Science and Engineering.

[4]  Meera Srinivasan,et al.  A post-processing receiver for the lunar laser communications demonstration project , 2013, Photonics West - Lasers and Applications in Science and Engineering.