The Tesat transportable adaptive optical ground station

Tesat together with Synopta have built a Transportable Adaptive Optical Ground Station (TAOGS) under contract of German Aerospace Center DLR for communication with the 1^st and 2^nd generation of Tesat’s spaceborne Laser Communication Terminals (LCTs), which employ coherent homodyne optical communication with 1064 nm and binary phase shift keying (BPSK) modulation. The TAOGS is able to communicate with space segments on low earth orbit (LEO, high pointing and tracking dynamics, 5.625 Gbps), and with space segments on geostationary orbit (GEO, low pointing dynamics, up to 40,000 km distance, optical data rate of 2.8125 Gbps and user data rate of 1.8 Gbps). After an alignment and testing phase at the location of Izana, Tenerife, using the TDP1 LCT on geostationary Alphasat as counter terminal, the TAOGS is now fully functioning. Several up-links, down-links and bi-directional links have been performed. Experimental results of some of these links are presented. An outlook to further activities is given.