News Releases

December 2006

Geostationary satellite / aircraft optical link, a world first

Using Onera's know-how in aero-optics, Astrium has been able to create a two-way aircraft to geostationary satellite laser link, with conclusive results from the first flight.

On the 5^th of December 2006, a DGA contract led to a world first: the demonstration of a two-way optical link between a geostationary satellite and an aircraft flying at 30,000 feet, in this instance the ESA Artemis satellite and a Mystère 20 from the Istres flight test center. The aircraft's optical terminal, developed by Eads-Astrium, is the forerunner of equipment intended to enable high and medium altitude UAVs to transmit their data via communication satellites. This demonstrator goes by the name of LOLA, whish stands for airborne laser optical link in French.

Onera's role

Onera's teams played a determining role in this success by providing the understanding of the physical phenomena that interfere with the laser propagation and helping to dimension the aircraft's optical terminal, define the window's fairing and predict the system's performances.

Though an optical link propagates in empty space in an easily foreseeable way, the atmospheric path proves to be more difficult, because of both atmospheric turbulence and the turbulence generated by the aircraft itself, at the level of the window. This is the type of multi-disciplinary challenge that Onera is adept at handling: the aerodynamic engineers and the specialists in optics worked together to model the turbulence and provide the system developer with a statistical model of the fluctuations in density that was used to dimension the system.

The physical parameters, obtained by simulation, supplied to Astrium enabled the company to make the link more robust and increased its performances from the very first flight.

We should stress the role played by the "PILOT" computing code, the acronym stands for Propagation and Imaging, Laser and Optics, through atmospheric Turbulence, one of Onera team's simulation codes that capitalizes on a whole unique body of know-how developed for the needs of high resolution imaging (adaptive optics...) in particular.

This technological success opens a new era in telecommunications between ground, aircraft and satellites, due to data speeds far superior to the radio frequencies currently used.

Last Update: 23 January 2007 - © ONERA 2009 - Terms of use