Ground Based Uplink and Beacon Laser for Long Range Communication

For deep space optical communications (OC) at astronomical distances (AU) such as Mars and beyond, a multi-kW average power laser that can be coded to send data is needed. OC will revolutionize space-based science and exploration capabilities by supplying data rates up to 100 times faster than the currently used radio frequency (RF) based systems. In response to that, PSI proposed to develop a laser to use as a ground beacon and uplink laser transmitter. The innovation is to develop a simple tapered fiber design that can produce high energy pulses at low pulse repetition rate (PRF) and also low energy pulses at high PRF. The versatility of the design fills the gap between these two types of lasers. In Phase I the laser was operated at 1 MHz with 150 uJ of pulse energy and also operated at 30 MHz with 5 uJ of energy. Former is suitable for long link distance to Mars and the latter is suitable for high data rate at 60 Mb/s. The proposed technology can also be applied to Er doped fiber to produce near 1.5 micron wavelength suitable for downlink laser. For deep space optical communications (OC) at astronomical distances (AU) such as Mars and beyond, a multi-kW average power laser that can be coded to send data is needed. OC will revolutionize space-based science and exploration capabilities by supplying data rates up to 100 times faster than the currently used radio frequency (RF) based systems. In response to that, PSI proposed to develop a laser to use as a ground beacon and uplink laser transmitter. The innovation is to develop a simple tapered fiber design that can produce high energy pulses at low pulse repetition rate (PRF) and also low energy pulses at high PRF.  The versatility of the design fills the gap between these two types of lasers.  In Phase I the laser was operated at 1 MHz with 150 uJ of pulse energy and also operated at 30 MHz with 5 uJ of energy.  Former is suitable for long link distance to Mars and the latter is suitable for high data rate at 60 Mb/s. The proposed technology can also be applied to Er doped fiber to produce near 1.5 micron wavelength suitable for downlink laser. Technical objectives (TO) are as follows TO1: Design a suitable tapered fiber with optimized core and cladding diameters, and taper length. The core diameter are large enough to suppress SBS and SRS and yet not too large to support TMI. Define the NA of core and cladding, doping concentration of Yb, composition of the glass for proper pump absorption. Based on that, design a glass preform to ensure the properties of the taper. TO2: Draw a tapered fiber and characterize for it physical properties such as uniformity of core and cladding diameter and uniform step index of the core throughout the length. TO3: Build a seed source with proper waveform such as pulsewidth and PRF with a flexibility to change the parameters as suited to the final output from the tapered fiber. TO4: Test tapered fibers from MITLL on a breadboard. We plan on couple of iteration of taper drawing. TO5: Build a prototype amplifier based on the custom tapered fiber. The deliverable in this program would be the prototype laser that will be built in this program. Also every quarter we will summarize all the data, findings and predictions in a report and deliver to NASA.

The proposed technology is applicable to NASA for communicating between satellites, space crafts or to the ground. The LCRD mission will demonstrate the first two-way rely optical communication.  Future Psyche mission, which is a journey to Psyche-16 between Mars and Jupiter, will test this new technology that encodes data in photons to communicate between a probe in deep space and Earth.   In this mission, deep-space optical communications technology using lasers will demonstrate link length extending from 0.1 to farther than 2 AU. High power and narrow-linewidth fiber lasers are necessary tools for the applications in gravitational wave detection, coherent LIDAR. A low-cost and high-data-rate optical communication terminals such as proposed here are required by SpaceX, Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Airbus who are pursuing High Altitude Platforms and very large LEO satellite constellations for global internet deployment.

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