A laser communications demonstration experiment (LCDE) between the Communications Research Laboratory in Tokyo and the International Space Station is being designed and implemented. To efficiently couple the downlink laser beam into a single-mode Erbium-doped preamplifier and to reduce uplink beam wander and scintillations, we plan to use low-order adaptive optics. The envisaged system dithers the wavefront actuators and evaluates the resulting variations of the received optical power. Simulation shows that, when controlling tilt, focus, and astigmatism, the power penalty due to residual wavefront error amounts to 2.3dB.
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