I'm really curious how the tracking works in such a system, and how "bad" the beam spread is (my impression is that from the diffraction limit alone the beam has to be spread over at least a ~10m radius after travelling 36000km).
Some info on the laser itself would also be very interesting (power? wavelength?).
"low-latency links", says the article. I wonder if they consider 500 ms ping to be low, or if they want to replace Geostationary with Low Earth Orbit.
But that means you need to have a different laser pointed at every single individual aircraft right? Doesn’t really scale.
I suppose you can do time-sharing. And use mems-mirrors to quickly move the beam between different targets.
I'm really curious how the tracking works in such a system, and how "bad" the beam spread is (my impression is that from the diffraction limit alone the beam has to be spread over at least a ~10m radius after travelling 36000km).
Some info on the laser itself would also be very interesting (power? wavelength?).
Really cool project though!
> and how "bad" the beam spread is
The spread makes the tracking easier, I suppose.
Impressive! I believe round trip latency would be 0.5 seconds.
That's ~162.5 MB in transit at any time
Shouldn't it be 1000/16 = 62.5? Impressive nonetheless, of course!
Weird.