The small optical user terminal (SOUT) is an optical communications transceiver for interconnecting a low earth orbiting satellite to future optical data relay terminals and is the subject of an ESA development programme led by MMS (UK), A complete breadboard terminal model has been constructed and tested to provide confidence in the feasibility of the flight design. The paper reports on the design of this elegant breadboard including the overall configuration, optical bench, and the pointing, acquisition and tracking (PAT) subsystem. The approach to the performance verification is discussed and the counter-terminal test equipment is described. The optical and PAT performances are presented which show that the terminal is compliant with the predicted performance.
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