NASA’s TBIRD CubeSat achieved a 200 Gbps laser downlink in 2023, transmitting 4.8 terabytes in under five minutes. SpaceX’s Starlink had over 4,000 satellites in orbit by early 2024, with inter-satellite laser links moving about 42 petabytes per day (roughly 5.6 terabits per second). Amazon’s Project Kuiper demonstrated 100 Gbps inter-satellite laser links in late…
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A 2-watt laser on a geostationary satellite delivered a 1 Gbps downlink to Earth from 36,000 km away. The AO-MDR system combines Adaptive Optics and Mode Diversity Reception to overcome atmospheric turbulence. The ground receiver used an 1.8-meter telescope with a 357-actuator deformable mirror to correct wavefront distortions. After AO correction, the beam was split…
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On June 17, 2025, a team led by Prof. Wu Jian (Peking University of Posts & Telecommunications) and Dr. Liu Chao (Chinese Academy of Sciences) achieved a 1 Gbps downlink from a geostationary satellite using a 2-watt optical laser. The GEO satellite was parked about 36,705 km above Earth and beamed data to a ground…
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In June 2025, a Chinese team led by Prof. Wu Jian of Peking University of Posts & Telecommunications and Dr. Liu Chao of the Chinese Academy of Sciences down-linked 1 Gbps from a GEO satellite 36,000 km away using a 2 W infrared laser. The coverage framed the feat as pulverizing Starlink, but there is…
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