Donald M. Cornwell

Overview and Results of the Lunar Laser Communication Demonstration

From mid-October through mid-November 2013, NASA’s Lunar Laser Communication Demonstration (LLCD) successfully demonstrated for the first time duplex laser communications between a satellite in lunar orbit, the Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE), and ground stations on the Earth. It constituted the longest-range laser communication link ever built and demonstrated the highest communication data rates ever achieved to or from the Moon. The system included the development of a novel space terminal, a novel ground terminal, two major upgrades of existing ground terminals, and a capable and flexible ground operations infrastructure. This presentation will give an overview of the system architecture and the several terminals, basic operations of both the link and the whole system, and some typical results.

Overview of laser communication technology at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center

A geosynchronous free space optical communications crosslink system is described. System analysis and technology development for a direct detection baseband digital optical crosslink at 650 Mbps is presented.

A New Optical Communication Architecture for Delivering Extremely Large Volumes of Data from Space to Ground

Space-based laser communication has been demonstrated at rates ranging from 10’s of Mbps to a few Gbps for near-Earth crosslinks and for direct-to-Earth downlinks from ranges as far as the Moon. We describe a novel space-to-Earth communication architecture that can deliver many terabytes of data regularly, if the user is willing to accept certain amounts of delay. With careful design of space and ground terminals, and by tapping the recent advances in integrated extremely high rate modems developed by the fiber telecommunications industry, we believe that space terminal cost, ground terminal cost, and operations costs can be kept much lower than present day radio-frequency or proposed optical systems while increasing the amount of data delivery by orders of magnitude.

Reference Interferometer Using a Semiconductor Laser/LED Reference Source in a Cryogenic Fourier-Transform Spectrometer

A combination of a single mode AlGaAs laser diode and a broadband LED was used in a Michelson interferometer to provide reference signals in a Fourier transform spectrometer, the Composite Infrared Spectrometer, on the Cassini mission to Saturn. The narrowband light from a laser produced continuous fringe throughout the travel of the interferometer, which were used to control the velocity of the scan mechanism and to trigger data sampling. The broadband light from the LED produced a burst of fringes at zero path difference, which was used as a fixed position reference. The system, including the sources, the interferometer, and the detectors, was designed to work both at room temperature and at the instrument operating temperature of 170 Kelvin. One major challenge that was overcome was preservation, from room temperature to 170 K, of alignment sufficient for high modulation of fringes from the broadband source. Another was the shift of the source spectra about 30 nm toward shorter wavelengths upon cooldown.

Injection chaining of diode-pumped single-frequency ring lasers for free-space communication

A high-power three-stage laser suitable for use in a space communication system has been built. This laser uses three diode-pumped Nd:YAG oscillators coherently combined using the technique of injection chaining. All three oscillators are in one compact and permanently aligned package, and are actively frequency locked to provide CW single frequency output. The three stages provide the redundancy desirable for space communications.

Enabling Communication and Navigation Technologies for Future Near Earth Science Missions

In 2015, the Earth Regimes Network Evolution Study (ERNESt) Team proposed a fundamentally new architectural concept, with enabling technologies, that defines an evolutionary pathway out to the 2040 timeframe in which an increasing user community comprised of more diverse space science and exploration missions can be supported. The architectural concept evolves the current instantiations of the Near Earth Network and Space Network through implementation of select technologies resulting in a global communication and navigation network that provides communication and navigation services to a wide range of space users in the Near Earth regime, defined as an Earth-centered sphere with radius of 2M Km. The enabling technologies include: High Rate Optical Communications, Optical Multiple Access (OMA), Delay Tolerant Networking (DTN), User Initiated Services (UIS), and advanced Position, Navigation, and Timing technology (PNT). This paper describes this new architecture, the key technologies that enable it and their current technology readiness levels. Examples of science missions that could be enabled by the technologies and the projected operational benefits of the architecture concept to missions are also described.

Research and development of laser diode based instruments for applications in space

Laser diode technology continues to advance at a very rapid rate due to commercial applications such as telecommunications and data storage. The advantages of laser diodes include, wide diversity of wavelengths, high efficiency, small size and weight and high reliability. Semiconductor and fiber optical-amplifiers permit efficient, high power master oscillator power amplifier (MOPA) transmitter systems. Laser diode systems which incorporate monolithic or discrete (fiber optic) gratings permit single frequency operation. We describe experimental and theoretical results of laser diode based instruments currently under development at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center including miniature lidars for measuring clouds and aerosols, water vapor and wind for Earth and planetary (Mars Lander) use.

Far Field and Wavefront Characterization of a High-Power Semiconductor Laser for Free Space Optical Communications

The spatial pointing angle and far field beamwidth of a high-power semiconductor laser are characterized as a function of CW power and also as a function of temperature. The time-averaged spatial pointing angle and spatial lobe width were measured under intensity-modulated conditions. The measured pointing deviations are determined to be well within the pointing requirements of the NASA Laser Communications Transceiver (LCT) program. A computer-controlled Mach-Zehnder phase-shifter interferometer is used to characterize the wavefront quality of the laser. The rms phase error over the entire pupil was measured as a function of CW output power. Time-averaged measurements of the wavefront quality are also made under intensity-modulated conditions. The measured rms phase errors are determined to be well within the wavefront quality requirements of the LCT program.

Phase-front measurements of an injection-locked AlGaAs laser-diode array.

The phase-front quality of the primary spatial lobe emitted from an injection-locked gain-guided AlGaAs laser diode array is measured by using an equal-path, phase-shifting Mach-Zehnder interferometer. Root-mean-square phase errors of 0.037 +/- 0.003 wave (lambda/27) are measured for the single spatial lobe, which contained 240-mW cw output power in a single longitudinal mode. This phase-front quality corresponds to a Strehl ratio of S = 0.947, which results in a 0.23-dB power loss from the single lobes ideal diffraction-limited power. These values are comparable with those measured for single-stripe index-guided AlGaAs lasers.

Time-Resolved Far-Field Analysis of a High Power Single Emitter Laser Diode

A system was developed which is capable of measuring the time-resolved far-field radiation patterns from a high-power semiconductor laser under intensity modulated conditions. Angular steering of the fundamental spatial mode was observed, with pointing variations as large as 0.5 deg, or 7.5 percent of the beamwidth, during the time of the optical pulse. The variations in pointing angle were directly related to gradients in the transverse index profile of the laser, which may oscillate based on lateral spatial hole burning of the gain and carrier density.