What, besides air, water and fresh vegetables, may we need to live on the moon? How about wireless internet access? By the way, this is often asked. Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and NASA have carefully considered this issue and believe that it is quite possible to solve it.
Two organizations for the first time demonstrated that data transmission in space can take place with the same convenience as on Earth, including the transfer of large amounts of data and high-quality video.
To do this, scientists will use four separate telescopes located on the ground terminal in New Mexico and send a signal to the moon. A laser transmitter capable of transmitting information in the form of coded pulses of invisible infrared light and installed in each of the telescopes provides 40 watts of transmitted power.
NASA and MIT will present their work at the CLEO conference in California, June 9, but the results have already been partially published by the community of opticians. The team will bother to explain how its laser data transmission between the Moon and the Earth could beat the previous data transfer record with a factor of 4800.
The team transferred data to 384,633 kilometers between the Earth and the Moon at a speed of 19.44 Mb / s and uploaded data at a speed of 622 Mb / s.
“High-speed data transmission from Earth to the Moon using laser beams is complicated by a distance of 400,000 kilometers at which the laser beam is scattered,” says Mark Stevens of MIT. “It is also doubly difficult for him to pass through the atmosphere, since turbulence bends light, thereby causing an interruption of the signal.”
Each of the four telescopes used to communicate with the Moon passes light through its own air column, which means all telescopes experience different effects of light curvature in the atmosphere. The chance that at least one of them gets into the receiver, which is located on the satellite in the orbit of the moon, is quite high. The satellite is also equipped with a telescope that collects the laser beam and focuses it into optical fiber. A photo detector turns light pulses into electrical pulses, and then they are converted to data.
All sounds, of course, not the best way, and indeed less than one billionth of a watt from a 40-watt signal gets to the satellite. Fortunately, this is ten times the signal needed for reliable communication, says Stevens.
When they present their findings on CLEO, scientists will comment on the importance of lasers and their ability to work through thin layers of the earth’s atmosphere. They will also have to explain how their system, designed for near-earth missions, will be able to work in deep space and Martian missions.
The article is based on materials .
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