NASA uses laser technology to stream 4K video footage to the International Space Station and back

The feat was achieved by a team at NASA’s Glenn Research Center in Cleveland as part of a series of tests on new technology that could provide live video coverage of astronauts on the Moon during the Artemis missions.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has used laser technology for the first time to stream 4K video footage from an aircraft to the International Space Station (ISS) and back.

According to NASA, the feat was achieved by a team at their Glenn Research Center in Cleveland. It was part of a series of tests on new technology that could provide live video coverage of astronauts on the Moon during the Artemis missions.

The NASA blog further states that historically, NASA has relied on radio waves to send information to and from space. However, Laser communications use infrared light to transmit 10 to 100 times more data faster than radio frequency systems.

The blog further said that working with the Air Force Research Laboratory and NASA’s Small Business Innovation Research program, engineers from the Glenn Research Center temporarily installed a portable laser terminal on the belly of a Pilatus PC-12 aircraft. They then flew over Lake Erie, sending data from the aircraft to an optical ground station in Cleveland. From there, it was sent over an Earth-based network to NASA’s White Sands Test Facility in Las Cruces, New Mexico, where scientists used infrared light signals to send the data.

The signals traveled 22,000 miles away from Earth to NASA’s Laser Communications Relay Demonstration (LCRD), an orbiting experimental platform. The LCRD then relayed the signals to the ILLUMA-T (Integrated LCRD LEO User Modem and Amplifier Terminal) payload mounted on the orbiting laboratory, which then sent data back to Earth. During the experiments, High-Rate Delay Tolerant Networking (HDTN), a new system developed at Glenn, helped the signal penetrate cloud coverage more effectively, the blog added.

“We can now build upon the success of streaming 4K HD videos to and from the space station to provide future capabilities, like HD videoconferencing, for our Artemis astronauts, which will be important for crew health and activity coordination,” said Dr Daniel Raible, principal investigator for the HDTN project at Glenn.

James Demers, chief of aircraft operations at Glenn added, “Teams at Glenn ensure new ideas are not stuck in a lab, but actually flown in the relevant environment to ensure this technology can be matured to improve the lives of all of us.”

As NASA continues to develop advanced science instruments to capture high-definition data on the Moon and beyond, the agency’s Space Communications and Navigation (SCaN), program adopts new technology such as laser communications to send large amounts of information back to Earth.