Mars Laser Communication Demonstration


The Mars Laser Communication Demonstration was a project to demonstrate optical communications on the 2009 Mars Telecommunications Orbiter. "Lasercom sends information using beams of light and optical elements, such as telescopes and optical amplifiers, rather than RF signals, amplifiers, and antennas"
It was a collaboration of Goddard SFC, JPL, and MIT Lincoln Lab. Building on work done by MIT/LL for NASA in 2002/2003.
The program for the Mars Telecommunications Orbiter was cancelled in 2005 and hence also the MLCD project.

Objectives and progress

The goal was a system to transmit data at 1 to 100 M bits/sec depending on distance and atmospheric conditions.
It was planned to use high bandwidth encoding and a photon counting receiver to increase the communications efficiency.
By 2004 the project was still evaluating alternative designs, particularly for the Earth terminal.

Flight terminal - on the spacecraft

The optical receiver on the spacecraft would be a 30.5 cm aperture telescope. To steer the telescope to track the beam it would include a Magnetohydrodynamic Inertial Reference Unit being developed for other projects.
The transmitter would use a laser, with a fibre amplifier, with about 5 W optical output. Using off the shelf 1.5 um communications devices.

Earth terminal

The earth terminal could either use existing astronomical telescopes, or an
Earth terminal based on the Lincoln Distributed Optical Receiver Architecture.
The earth terminal might transmit at 1030 nm to 1064 nm, at 120 W output. Either multiple beams through a single wide aperture telescope or 6 separate 30 cm beams in an array of telescopes.