The European Space Agency (ESA) is using the precision of Yokogawa’s optical wavelength meters to ensure accurate tuning of lasers used in Earth to space communications. ESA operates a network of geostationary satellites who communicate with a constellation Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellites called Sentinels and are used for Earth monitoring applications. The geostationary satellites traditionally use radio communication to upload the LEO satellites’ images and other data to terrestrial servers. However the growing amount of information the LEO satellites produce means that the available bandwidth from radio communication links will soon be too low to meet ESA’s data transfer needs.
Using the highly accurate AQ6151B to tune lasers, ESA expects that optical transmission could take on the burden of handling high bandwidth traffic, replacing radio communication as the primary means of sending and receiving data from satellites.
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