The Aerospace Information Innovation Institute (AIR) of China has recently successfully completed a revolutionary experiment in real working conditions, which increased the speed of laser communication between satellites and the Earth to 120 Gbps. This set a new record in the field of high speed data transmission from space.
The experiment was realized using a self-developed laser ground station with a diameter of 500 millimeters, placed on the Pamir Plateau in the Chinese province of Xinjiang, which communicated directly with the AIRSAT-02 satellite.
Laser communication 120 Gbps without hardware changes
It is particularly significant that no physical hardware modification was performed on the AIRSAT-02 satellite itself. The engineering team managed to increase the bandwidth from the previous 60 Gbps to as much as 120 Gbps, which practically doubled the data transmission capacity, solely by software reconstruction of the system in orbit.
The test results confirmed the high stability and efficiency of the system. The satellite and the ground station established a connection within seconds, with a success rate of more than 93%. The maximum continuous duration of communication was 108 seconds, during which a total of 12,656 terabits of data, or approximately 1.5 terabytes, were transferred.
The chief technical manager of the project vividly explained the significance of this technological leap. According to him, if the achievement of 10 Gbps in 2023 was like a narrow bridge for one-way traffic, then 120 Gbps is equivalent to the construction of multi-lane highways, which require not only extreme transmission speed, but also extremely efficient parallel management of huge amounts of data.
This result represents a major step forward for future satellite networks, the transmission of large amounts of data from space, as well as for applications in the field of remote sensing, space exploration and global communication systems.