"low-latency links", says the article. I wonder if they consider 500 ms ping to be low, or if they want to replace Geostationary with Low Earth Orbit.
fidotron 28 minutes ago [-]
Getting it to work with one end stationary first sounds like a reasonable development plan. LEO adds a lot of complexity, but with huge benefits.
OTOH the number of engineers that focus on throughput over latency is quite staggering.
IrishTechie 23 minutes ago [-]
I guess if your goal is just to stream aircraft telemetry and black box like recordings then latency may not be high on the agenda.
myrmidon 2 hours ago [-]
I'm really curious how the tracking works in such a system, and how "bad" the beam spread is (my impression is that from the diffraction limit alone the beam has to be spread over at least a ~10m radius after travelling 36000km).
Some info on the laser itself would also be very interesting (power? wavelength?).
Really cool project though!
amelius 1 hours ago [-]
> and how "bad" the beam spread is
The spread makes the tracking easier, I suppose.
cm2187 1 hours ago [-]
But that means you need to have a different laser pointed at every single individual aircraft right? Doesn’t really scale.
voidUpdate 11 minutes ago [-]
If starlink satellites get laser downlink, it might work :P
amelius 1 hours ago [-]
I suppose you can do time-sharing. And use mems-mirrors to quickly move the beam between different targets.
xnx 3 hours ago [-]
Impressive! I believe round trip latency would be 0.5 seconds.
Shouldn't it be 1000/16 = 62.5? Impressive nonetheless, of course!
1e1a 18 minutes ago [-]
The article says 2.6 gigabits/second which is 2,600,000,000 bits/second, 2,600,000,000b/s * 0.5s / 8 is 162,500,000 bytes, 162,500,000 / 1,000,000 is 162.5 megabytes
zppln 2 hours ago [-]
Weird.
Rendered at 13:40:50 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
OTOH the number of engineers that focus on throughput over latency is quite staggering.
Some info on the laser itself would also be very interesting (power? wavelength?).
Really cool project though!
The spread makes the tracking easier, I suppose.