Terran Orbital (NYSE:LLAP) Corporation has achieved another record-breaking space-to-gound optical link, the company announced.
The company’s Pathfinder Technology Demonstrator 3 (PTD-3) satellite enabled a 200 gigabits per second space-to-ground optical link. The NASA satellite hosts the TeraByte InfraRed Delivery (TBIRD) payload funded by NASA Space Communications and Navigation and developed by MIT Lincoln Laboratory.
That transmission rate is multiple orders of magnitude faster than current state-of-the-art satellite communications, this technology enables spacecraft to downlink several terabytes of data to the ground in a single ground station pass, according to a statement.
It’s the kind of breakthrough that has the potential to shift the space-based earth observation and synthetic aperture radar industries, the company said.
The previous record, also a Terrain Orbital-assisted data transmission from TBIRD, involved 1.4 terabytes of test data to a single ground station in a pass that lasted less than five minutes. At the time, it was record-beaking in terms of both speed and data quantity.
Now, that record has been broken.
“The completion of the 200 gigabits per second link is both monumental and record-breaking,” CEO Marc Bell said in a statement. “Terran Orbital (NYSE:LLAP) is honored to have worked alongside NASA on this groundbreaking mission and is grateful to MIT Lincoln Laboratory for creating the payload. We look forward to working with NASA and MIT Lincoln Laboratory on future satellites as we continue to make record-breaking in space commonplace.”
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