Dubbed by the press as the “space based laser” will the European Data Relay System improve the global monitoring of the Earth’s environment and natural disasters?
By: Ringo Bones
When the “first node” of the European Data Relay System
(EDRS) space based lasers – a relay satellite that was launched on a Russian
Proton rocket from the famous Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan back in January
30, 2016, many see it as a quantum leap on how it can now improve on how
civilian firms acquire images taken from orbital space and its transmission to
ground stations. At present, it can take hours to get pictures taken from Earth
observation satellites down to ground stations due to the inherent data
bandwidth limitations of microwaves currently used to transmit digital photographic
data between observation satellites in Earth’s orbit to ground stations even
though microwaves and the lasers used in the new EDRS network of satellites
both travel at the same 186,000 miles per second / 300,000 kilometers per
second velocity.
Initial testing by the European Space Agency’s industrial
partner – Airbus Defence and Space – shows it should be possible for the system
to put pictures on the desks of people who need them on the ground within 20
minutes of those images being acquired which before the newfangled system used
to take several hours of wait time. By way of comparison, the European Data Relay
System’s space-based laser or “laser link” provides 90 to 100 times the normal
internet speed currently being used in homes of major metropolitan areas around
the world. For some applications – such as the monitoring of pollution
incidents, illegal fishing or ocean piracy – the time saved could be critical
to formulating and achieving an effective response.
“The European Data Relay System (EDRS) could open up a new
horizon to what I would call quasi real time Earth observation.” says Magali
Vaissiere, the European Space Agency’s director of telecoms. “EDRS has been in
development for more than 10 years. Getting satellites to talk to each other
via a narrow laser beam is no easy task,” says European Space Agency project
manager Michael Witting. With a successful connection, data will move at a rate
of up to 1.8 Gb per second.
