L A SER C ONNECTI V IT Y
WHAT IS
THE ESA?
The European Space Agency is an organisation
comprising 22 European states “But these are
not the same as the EU member states, as the
entities are legally different” says Dr. Harald
Hauschildt, ScyLight programme manager at
ESA. “For example we have Switzerland in
there, and we have Norway, and also Canada as
participating states, so it’s independent from
the European Commission, though the EC is
also investing in space and we have overlaps.
Regarding the UK, in principle, Brexit will not
affect UK participation in ESA, and the UK is
actually investing a lot in the ESA.”
“ We are talking about 1 terabit
per second of data rate”
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aircraftinteriorsinternational.com
SEPTEMBER 2019
W hether it’s for connecting with their offices,
catching up on social media, or viewing live
high-definition video content, airline passengers’
voracious appetite for data could, in the future, be
facilitated by a European Space Agency (ESA) initiative
to extend high-speed broadband into the skies using
laser-enabled data transfer, relayed instantaneously via
a network of satellites in space. With commercial airline
traffic set to double by 2035 and with exponential
demand for data-intensive content, the inflight
communications infrastructure will need a colossal
upgrade to cope with throughput and capacity demands.
The backbone for the ESA’s vision of a fibre-in-the-sky
infrastructure is the European Data Relay System (EDRS),
established through a public–private partnership between
the ESA and Airbus. This system provides near-real-time
data services to the European Commission’s Copernicus
satellite fleet. Additionally, based on the satellite industry’s
consensus that lasers will be the next big thing in satcoms,
the ESA has launched ScyLight (SeCure and Laser
communication Technology), a programme that supports
research, development and evolution of optical
communications using laser technologies and satellites.
This programme will create the roadmap that’s needed
in order to deliver the prerequisite data transmission
throughputs, security and resilience for the future.
“We want to use laser links to transfer a huge amount
of data like you do with fibre today on the ground, and
this sounds simpler than it is because you need to have
optical terminals to connect the satellites and you have
to connect the satellites to the ground using lasers,”
Dr Harald Hauschildt, ScyLight programme manager at
ESA told Aircraft Interiors International. “But if you have
this infrastructure in orbit then high-speed optical
connections that exist today in everyone’s home could
also be available eventually on aircraft”.
To put this into practice a programme called HydRON
is poised to kick off early next year that will harmonise
the data flow, using lasers, between LEO (low Earth orbit)
satellites that orbit the Earth every 100 minutes at an
altitude of 800km (497 miles), GEO (geostationary)
satellites operating at fixed positions 36,000km (22,369
miles) from Earth, terrestrial stations, and ultimately,
aircraft. The HydRON (High Throughput Optical
Network) programme will, in its first phase, investigate
the end-to-end system architectures of a highthroughput
(one terabit per second) system and
THE EUROPEAN DATA RELAY
SYSTEM EDRS USES A
NEW GENERATION LASER
COMMUNICATION TERMINAL
LCT TECHNOLOGY TO RELAY
INFORMATION AND DATA.
PHOTO: EUROPEAN SPACE AGENCY
Light f idelity
(li-fi) connectivity
could become big.
Find out more in the
Features section of
identify key elements of the system architecture.
These elements will include optical feeder links,
optical inter-satellite links, on-board routing and
other enabling technologies. To reality-check the
technology, the programme will also define a
mission in LEO / GEO orbit to demonstrate
feasibility and evaluate the communication
performances and cost of the critical elements.
WHY LASERS?
Radio Frequency (RF)-based systems used to deliver wi-fi
in today’s passenger cabins provide speeds of around 10
to 15 megabits per second (Mbps) to each passenger,
whereas Dr Hauschildt says that with laser connections,
“what we are talking about in the sky is in the order of
1 terabit per second of data rate to be exchanged via
satellite using optical connections to the aircraft”.
In addition to this quantum boost in speed and
capacity compared to the Ku and Ka bands that facilitate
today’s onboard connectivity, transferring data via laser –
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