Space Systems/Loral (SS/L) (NASDAQ: LORL), the world's leading provider of commercial satellites, today announced that it is teaming with NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center to host a laser communications relay demonstration (LCRD) on a commercial satellite to be launched in 2016. NASA 's Space Technology Program selected Goddard's mission proposal to use the SS/L satellite platform to help enable the next era of space communications.
Optical communications use an uncongested portion of spectrum compared to the radio frequency (RF) communications currently used to transmit data from space. Additionally, laser communications (lasercom) has the potential to provide order of magnitude higher data rates than RF, providing the potential to enable access to much more of the vast amounts of data that are being gathered from distant planets, including images and video. For commercial satellites, lasercom could provide data at rates that are faster than today's RF rates, with much less mass and power, which are the typical constraints on satellite design.
