Citation
Abstract
Over the last decade, adaptive optics technology has moved from the purview of a Department of Defense laboratory to astronomical telescopes around the world, and recently to industry, where adaptive optics systems have been developed to correct atmospheric-induced signal fades on high-bandwidth horizontal-path optical links. As JPL develops optical communications technology for high-bandwidth optical links from its deep-space probes, we are exploring the application of adaptive optics to the optical deep-space receiver to improve the quality of the link under turbulent atmospheric and high-background conditions. To provide maximum communications support, the operational deep-space optical communications receiver will need to point close to the Sun or to a bright Sun-illuminated planet. Under these conditions, the background noise from the sky degrades the quality of the optical link, especially when the atmospheric seeing is poor. In this work, we analyze how adaptive optics could be used to mitigate the effects of sky and planetary background noise on the deep-space optical communications receiver’s performance in poor seeing conditions. Our results show that, under nominal background sky conditions, gains of 4 dB can be achieved for the uncoded bit-error rate of 0.01.
Keywords
Details
- Volume
- 42-161
- Published
- May 15, 2005
- Pages
- 1–16
- File Size
- 334.8 KB