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| Science & Technology |
| U.S. team pulls 40 Gbps in lasercomm test |
| 2007-04-26 |
| Laser technology being designed for the next-generation U.S. military communications satellite has passed a recent laboratory test. The "lasercomm" technology produced data speeds up to 40 gigabits per second, or Gbps, in the test carried out recently at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Lasercomm is slated for use in the TSAT, or Transformational Satellite Communications System, which is being developed to provide high-speed and secure Internet Protocol networking to be used by military and intelligence agencies. The system employs terminals that are smaller and cheaper than radios; however, it requires the capability to connect these terminals with a satellite thousands of miles away using a thin laser beam to carry the data. Northrop Grumman's satellite team in Los Angeles County said in a statement that the "milestone moves the team's TSAT efforts a major step forward, providing high confidence in this critical technology." Northrop is part of a team that includes Lockheed Martin and is competing for the TSAT contract to be awarded late this year. The companies said the test dubbed Lasercomm Test 2 was run last month at MIT's Lincoln Laboratory. It was actually the third test of lasercomm performed on the lab's Optical Standards Validation Suite test bed. Engineers used the test to evaluate pointing, tracking, and communication performance as well as the interoperability of the Northrop Grumman brassboard lasercomm terminal with the test bed at data rates ranging from 2.5 Gbps to 40 Gbps. |
| Posted by:Anonymoose |
| #14 Trick is, how do you make sense of it all? An old friend of mine who used to work with Seymour Cray and had a security clearance once asked me, "Ya know how Tom Clancy writes about the NSA having rooms full of Cray supercomputers? ... Well, it's true." |
| Posted by: Zenster 2007-04-26 23:09 |
| #13 OP: Unfortunately, I left the books at work, but atmospheric absorption and scattering is depending on frequency. There are bands where it is much less than others. (Surprisingly enough, most countries' radars are in that region.) |
| Posted by: Jackal 2007-04-26 22:36 |
| #12 Mexicans are available who will do the work that Americans will not. Just drag a fiver through town at around 7AM. |
| Posted by: wxjames 2007-04-26 19:23 |
| #11 All well and good, but how do you communicate during a heavy cloud cover or in sandstorms and other local weather conditions? Using microwaves would work to a point, but there is still interference. I think there's more to the system than what's being discussed - at least I hope so. An SR-71 could map 95,000 square miles in an hour. It usually took a team of 20 people ten days to interpret all the targetted installations covered. I KNOW we do ten times that much today, and that doesn't include all the drones that are flying. I'd bet the military has an overwhelming need for well-trained imagery analysts. Computers can only do so much. |
| Posted by: Old Patriot 2007-04-26 16:58 |
| #10 Spam at hyperspeed |
| Posted by: Captain America 2007-04-26 15:57 |
| #9 "You have reached the end of the Internet. Please hit the 'RETURN' key to start over." A geek's dream! |
| Posted by: Almost Anonymous5839 2007-04-26 10:48 |
| #8 I've always guessed that it was a LOT. Trick is, how do you make sense of it all? Computer data sorting. Think tanks and national labs aren't the only places building cluster-based supercomputers. |
| Posted by: FOTSGreg 2007-04-26 10:38 |
| #7 T&ASAT. |
| Posted by: Excalibur 2007-04-26 09:25 |
| #6 MEthinks they should drop the word communication. |
| Posted by: Mike N. 2007-04-26 09:07 |
| #5 TSAT, or Transformational Satellite Communications System Hmmm... that acronym doesn't look right to me. |
| Posted by: Rob Crawford 2007-04-26 06:49 |
| #4 I've always guessed that it was a LOT. Trick is, how do you make sense of it all? |
| Posted by: Steve White 2007-04-26 01:33 |
| #3 You'd be surprised at the data that is generated in a day by the DoD and all the sensors on all the platforms out there. |
| Posted by: OldSpook 2007-04-26 01:28 |
| #2 They better get busy and make some more pr0n because at those speeds people are going to go through everything that exists today in no time at all! |
| Posted by: gorb 2007-04-26 00:57 |
| #1 Wow! Think of the pr0n you can download with those speeds! |
| Posted by: DarthVader 2007-04-26 00:29 |