This ground station leverages the one-meter telescope and adaptive optics (to correct for distortions caused by atmospheric turbulence) at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory Optical Communications Telescope Laboratory, with Lincoln Laboratory providing the TBIRD-specific ground communications hardware. The optical ground station is located in Table Mountain, California, where most weather takes place below the mountain's summit, making this part of the sky relatively clear for laser communication. Weighing approximately 25 pounds and the size of two stacked cereal boxes, the CubeSat was launched into low-Earth orbit (LEO) aboard Space X's Transporter-5 rideshare mission from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida in May 2022. NASA Ames Research Center established this program to develop a CubeSat bus (the 'vehicle' that powers and steers the payload) for bringing science and technology demonstrators into orbit more quickly and inexpensively. With small, low-cost space and ground terminals, TBIRD can enable scientists from around the world to fully take advantage of laser communications to downlink all the data they could ever dream of.ĭesigned and built at Lincoln Laboratory, the TBIRD communications payload was integrated onto a CubeSat manufactured by Terran Orbital as part of NASA's Pathfinder Technology Demonstrator program. Science instruments in space today routinely generate more data than can be returned to Earth over typical space-to-ground communications links.

MIT Lincoln Laboratory conceptualized the TBIRD mission in 2014 as a means of providing unprecedented capability to science missions at low cost. And these record-setting speeds were all made possible by a communications payload roughly the size of a tissue box. This data rate is more than 1,000 times higher than that of the radio-frequency links traditionally used for satellite communication and the highest ever achieved by a laser link from space to ground. Since then, TBIRD has delivered terabytes of data at record-breaking rates of up to 100 gigabits per second - 100 times faster than the fastest internet speeds in most cities - via an optical communication link to a ground-based receiver in California. In May 2022, the TeraByte InfraRed Delivery (TBIRD) payload onboard a small CubeSat satellite was launched into orbit 300 miles above Earth's surface.

Space optics technology