Regina Garcia
NASA has tapped SpaceLink to conduct a study on the integration of commercial optical ground terminals into the space agency’s Near Space Network architecture to help with the orbital communication system’s commercialization.
Under the contract from NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, SpaceLink said Tuesday it will craft a tracking and data relay satellite system-like capability on medium Earth orbit to ensure safe real-time data transmission and grow throughput. The effort looks to accelerate communication between spacecraft in orbit and ground users.
The contract will entail SpaceLink demonstrating an end-to-end multi-source data transport at its gateway in the Mojave Desert to the space agency’s terrestrial network via Amazon Web Services‘ cloud infrastructure.
“Developing our data transport system has pushed the SpaceLink architecture team to optimize across space, ground, client, and network segments, and to address challenges associated with optical high-capacity data delivery solutions,” said Rob Singh, chief technology officer at SpaceLink.
