← Back to NASA Technology Projects
Completed TRL 5 (started at 2, targeting 9)
Satellites in low-Earth orbit (LEO) have on-board sensors that can generate large amounts of data to be delivered to a ground user. Direct-to-Earth delivery from LEO is challenging because of the sparse contact with a ground terminal, but the short link distances involved can enable very high data rates by exploiting the abundance of spectrum available at optical frequencies. NASA's Terabyte Infrared Delivery (TBIRD) program will demonstrate a direct-to-Earth laser communication link from a small satellite platform to a small ground terminal at burst rates up to 200 Gbps. Such a link is capable of transferring several terabytes per day to a single ground terminal. The high burst rates are achieved by leveraging off-the-shelf fiber-telecommunications transceivers for use in space applications. A 2U TBIRD payload is currently being developed for flight on a 6U NASA CubeSat. The relatively short distance (~ 1000 km) and corresponding reduced range loss of a direct-to-Earth (DTE) LEO laser link offers an opportunity to provide extremely high bandwidth downlinks at very low cost, size, weight, and power (SWaP). Under NASA SCaN support, MIT Lincoln Laboratory is developing the TeraByte InfraRed Delivery (TBIRD) terminal [6,7] to demonstrate a 200 Gbps downlink using only 1.8U x 1U x 1U volume (1U=10 cm) and less than 2.25 kg. The two baseline 100 Gbps modems are variants of a highly-integrated COTS design that was modified to be space-qualified; current efforts are now focused on the on-board 2.0 terabyte (TB) memory and controller which must be read at similar data rates. A demonstration flight is planned on the NASA Space Technology Mission Directorate (STMD) Pathfinder 3 CubeSat in late 2020 and it is expected to demonstrate downloads of the entire 2.0 TB data buffer on a single pass. While the initial demonstration will use existing NASA optical ground stations with adaptive optics (AO), there are plans to develop low-cost optical ground stations to support such rates to be specifically co-located at mission data storage facilities or even commercial data centres to reduce the cost of ground-based fiber backhaul at such data rates.
Low-Earth orbit is a desirable regime for many remote sensing and Earth-observing satellites due to its close proximity to Earth. Traditionally, these missions have been accomplished with large satellites (>500 kg) that often carry multiple exquisite instruments which may take measurements on multiple frequency channels [1]. The cumulative data volume that such instruments generate can be quite large as well. For example, the Terra satellite (launched in 1999 and still operating) carries a multispectral sensor suite that produces nearly 200GB of data per day onboard the spacecraft [1]. Single-instrument satellites can also generate hefty data volumes. For example, ICESat-2, launched in 2018 and now operational, carries a lidar instrument that produces up to 70GB per day after significant on-board compression [2]. Some upcoming science missions are targeting much larger data volumes. For example, the NISAR satellite (expected launch 2021) performs synthetic radar imaging (SAR) and plans to collect at least 4300GB (or 4:3 TB) per day for delivery to a ground network [3]. As another example, the medium-sized 200 kg satellite for the SWOT mission expects to generate 0:9 TB of daily with its radar instrument after 20x compression [4].
Listed on TechPort itself — the most direct way to ask about this specific project.
This is early/mid-stage (TRL 5) — the most realistic path in is NASA SBIR/STTR, which funds small businesses and research institutions to develop technology aligned with NASA's needs (equity-free, phased funding). Check whether a current SBIR/STTR solicitation topic overlaps with this project's technology area, or contact the project directly (above) to ask.
None of these are guaranteed paths for this specific project — TechPort itself doesn't have an "apply" button. Reaching out to the contact(s) above with a specific question is usually the fastest way to find out what's actually open.