ref:topbtw-3190.html/ 26 Dicembre 2021/A
Theresa Hitchens on Breaking Defense explained:
WASHINGTON:
DARPA’s project to develop low-cost, high-speed and, perhaps most importantly, reconfigurable optical data links
to connect non-compatible Low Earth Orbit satellite constellations is a go, with 14 firms winning awards
for the project’s design phase.
Commercial firms, as well as the Pentagon’s Space Development Agency, are planning to orbit thousands
of new high-bandwidth communications satellites in LEO, explained DARPA Program Manager Greg Kuperman in a
video on the far-future research agency’s website.
“But due to how new these systems are, and the cutting edge technology needed for optical communications and space,
there are numerous incompatible standards that prevent satellites from talking to each other,” he said.
Indeed, SDA director Derek Tournear has repeatedly said that optical satellite interlinks, or OSILs, are the
long pole in the tent for his agency’s ambitious effort to develop a resilient constellation for multiple military
space missions under the National Defense Space Architecture — especially for SDA’s joint hypersonic missile
tracking effort with the Missile Defense Agency.
Space-BACN, for Space-Based Adaptive Communications Node, is DARPA’s project to solve that problem.
The initiative consists of three parts, or Technical Areas, for research activities.
The agency has made awards in the first two of the three-month-long “Phase 0” design, Kuperman
told Breaking Defense in an email.
For both of these Technical Areas, Phase 0 awards each totaled $300,000 over 15 weeks, the DARPA solicitation noted.
TA1 will, in essence, develop the telescope on what DARPA hopes will be a standardized terminal
for sending and receiving laser links. DARPA’s September solicitation states that the aim of TA1 is
to “develop a modular, low -size,-weight, -power and -cost (SWaP-C) optical aperture,” including
“an overall terminal controller, responsible for pointing, acquisition, and tracking” and terminal command and telemetry.
Kuperman said the firms winning Phase 0 contracts for this “front end” of the optical terminal system are:
CACI, Honeywell, L3 Technologies (L3 Harris), MBRYONICS, Mynaric, SA Photonics and Boeing.
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