Lasers, page-3

Refer to the announcement 30-Sep-2019: EOS Establishes Space Communications Business

Thank you for making me read this announcement again, it's tremendously exciting.

The breakthrough allows communication between ground stations and satellites to be achieved using a laser beam that has 1/1000th the power of the beams that are required without it. The atmosphere distorts a beam as it travels through regions with different density. That scatters and deflects the beam. Without Electro Optical's technology you have to have to transmit a beam wide enough and strong enough that what actually hits the satellite still has sufficient power for the satellite to decode. Most of the beam is lost. This means that earth stations can't be located in places where atmospheric turbulence and inversion layers are common. High-power lasers are also expensive.

Astronomers have the same problem with ground-based telescopes. The light from stars is deflected and scattered by the atmosphere, weakening and blurring the image. To counter this, they use a technology that uses laser beams to measure atmospheric distortion in real time, and adjust the optics of the telescope to negate the atmospheric distortion.

What Electro Optic has done is to adapt this technology to an outbound light beam from their communications laser. They measure the atmospheric distortion between the earth station and the satellite, and then adjust the direction and focus of the outbound beam so that the atmospheric distortion "corrects" the beam en route. Much less power is wasted. They have more freedom regarding the location of ground stations, and can use much cheaper low-power lasers