World-first gigabit laser link between aircraft and geostationary satellite

 (esa.int)

32 points | by giuliomagnifico 3 days ago

5 comments

  • utopiah 6 minutes ago
    Nice, if you want a bit more details on the TNO side https://www.tno.nl/en/newsroom/2026/02/airbus-tno-demonstrat... relying on https://connectivity.esa.int/archives/projects/ultraair
  • Meneth 48 minutes ago
    "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.
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    • fidotron 7 minutes ago
      Getting it to work with one end stationary first sounds like a reasonable development plan. LEO adds a lot of complexity, but with huge benefits.

      OTOH the number of engineers that focus on throughput over latency is quite staggering.

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      • IrishTechie 2 minutes ago
        I guess if your goal is just to stream aircraft telemetry and black box like recordings then latency may not be high on the agenda.
  • myrmidon 1 hour ago
    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!

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    • amelius 51 minutes ago
      > and how "bad" the beam spread is

      The spread makes the tracking easier, I suppose.

  • cm2187 57 minutes ago
    But that means you need to have a different laser pointed at every single individual aircraft right? Doesn’t really scale.
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    • amelius 48 minutes ago
      I suppose you can do time-sharing. And use mems-mirrors to quickly move the beam between different targets.
  • xnx 2 hours ago
    Impressive! I believe round trip latency would be 0.5 seconds.
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