Developments of an optical ground station network for LEO-to-ground satellite data services

The Swedish Space Corporation (SSC) is developing a novel space-to-ground data service leveraging optical communications. This initiative aims to establish a flexible and autonomous network of optical ground stations to facilitate direct-to-Earth data delivery from low Earth orbit (LEO) satellites. An advanced software system has been developed to streamline operations, encompassing user management, elastic scheduling, data delivery, and remote site control.The deployment of the first two stations, part of the European Space Agency supported NODES project, is underway at SSC sites in Western Australia and Santiago, Chile. This marks one of the first commercial optical ground segment services, setting the stage for commercial free-space optical links up to 10 Gbps. In the paper, first steps to integrate and test the service will be discussed. Additionally, utilising cloud cover data and flight dynamics modelling, performance simulations for both the initial service and a future expanded network will be presented.