Moon-to-Earth High Bandwidth Optical Data Link

摘要

A large scale Lunar teleoperation project has been proposed (1) consisting of a small fleet of ten Lunar roving vehicles, each with a compliment of fifty remotely steerable stereoscopic camera heads. Earth-bound users gain access through the Internet with a hierarchy of participation, ranging from vehicle driver, to active viewer, to passive viewer. Earth uplink to the Moon consist of vehicle piloting and camera head positioning commands, and are of relatively low bandwidth. The Moon-to-Earth downlink, however, must have sufficient bandwidth to handle 500 simultaneous stereoscopic video feeds. An optical communication link is described, first as satellites, and second, with atmospheric effects for ground-based reception. Link budget and aperture/power tradeoffs for various baseline designs are considered. Technical challenges of operating in a Lunar environment are described.