1/10/2023 0 Comments Laser pulse faster than light![]() ![]() "The speed of light is faster in vacuum than in fiber, so the space lasers have exciting potential for low latency links," the Starlink team said on Reddit in response to a question about the space-laser testing. Starlink engineers provided more detail in a Reddit AMA in November here's an excerpt from our coverage at the time: SpaceX had revealed a few months earlier that it was testing space lasers for transferring data between satellites. In December, during an interview with Ars' Senior Space Editor Eric Berger, SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell said that demonstrating laser communications in space was among the company's most significant achievements in 2020. With polar orbits, also known as Sun-synchronous orbits, satellites "travel past Earth from north to south rather than from west to east, passing roughly over Earth's poles," as the European Space Agency explains. The FCC approval allowing SpaceX to cut the altitude in half will help reduce latency. The 10 satellites were originally authorized by the FCC for altitudes in the 1,100-1,300km range. They can also decrease latency, since the number of hops between satellites and ground stations are reduced. Such links allow operators to minimize the number of ground stations, since a ground station no longer needs to be in the same satellite footprint as user terminals, and extend coverage to remote areas where ground stations are not available. Inter-satellite links allow satellites to transfer communications from one satellite to another, either in the same orbital plane or an adjacent plane. A SpaceNews article today described how the laser links reduce the need for ground stations and provide other benefits: Starlink satellites communicate with ground stations, of which about 20 are deployed in the United States so far. The satellites can serve both residential and US-government users "in otherwise impossible-to-reach polar areas," SpaceX said. The plan is to "ensure that all of the satellites in SpaceX's system will provide the same low-latency services to all Americans, including those in places like Alaska that are served by satellites in polar orbits," SpaceX said at the time. For now, SpaceX is only including laser links on polar satellites. "Only our polar sats have lasers this year & are v0.9," Musk wrote.Īlaskan residents will benefit from the polar satellites, SpaceX told the FCC in an application to change the orbit of some of its satellites in April 2020. "All sats launched next year will have laser links," Musk wrote in another tweet yesterday, indicating that the laser systems will become standard on Starlink satellites in 2022. The launch came two weeks after SpaceX received Federal Communications Commission approval to launch the 10 satellites into polar orbits at an altitude of 560km. SpaceXThe laser links are included in 10 Starlink satellites just launched into polar orbits.
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