Description: This NASA-Arizona State University cooperative agreement developed a novel CubeSat form-factor Deployable Optical Receive Aperture (DORA) system for inter-spacecraft communications capable of up to one gigabit per second (Gbps) optical data rates at distances of 5,000 to 10,000 km. Built with commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) components, DORA is a cost-effective system that has a large collecting area, eliminating the need precision pointing accuracy requirements on the host spacecraft. Consequently, DORA is ideally suited for crosslink communications among small spacecraft, especially for those forming a swarm and/or a constellation, and for surface-to-orbit communications. As part of the proposed effort, a 3U CubeSat was designed, built, and tested that contains a DORA demonstration payload capable of closing a 1 Gbps link across 1000 km at 10^-8 bit error rate. No technology currently exists, with this effort representing a significant improvement over the state-of-the-art, with many enabling qualities, that would benefit both NASA and industry in future space architectures that require high data transfer rates.

Benefits: The key features of this technology are its low-cost using COTS components and the ability to allow the host spacecraft to overcome constraints imposed by traditional optical communications systems that require high-precision bus pointing on the order of arcseconds. The notable appeal of this technology is its ability to achieve 1 Gigabit/second laser communications at 1000 km range with very lax spacecraft pointing requirements of ≤ 20° thanks to the novel wide-angle optical receiver, all with COTS components. This would be significant improvement over the SOA with current SmallSat missions targeting 20 Megabits/second at 500 km with a much tighter ≤ 15” pointing for spacecraft. On a broader scale, this technology could enable simpler, cheaper, and higher performance optical communications target acquisition for and amongst CubeSats and/or bigger spacecraft (configured, say, in a swarm or as part of the LunaNet network) by receiving signals from more widely separated locations than traditional fixed, body-mounted optical systems that have more stringent pointing requirements.