Kuiper internet satellites will form a mesh network using optical links.
Amazon Fires Up Its Space Lasers
Posted in internet, satellites
Category: internet – Page 51
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — An orange tabby cat named Taters stars in the first video transmitted by laser from deep space, stealing the show as he chases a red laser light.
The 15-second video was beamed to Earth from NASA’s Psyche spacecraft, 19 million miles (30 million kilometers) away. It took less than two minutes for the ultra high-definition video to reach Caltech’s Palomar Observatory, sent at the test system’s maximum rate of 267 megabits per second.
The video was loaded into Psyche’s laser communication experiment before the spacecraft blasted off to a rare metal asteroid in October. The mission team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, decided to feature an employee’s 3-year-old playful kitty.
Watch live coverage as SpaceX launches a Falcon 9 rocket with 23 second-generation Starlink internet satellites. Liftoff from pad 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station is scheduled for tonight at 11:01 p.m. EST (0401 UTC). The first-stage booster, making its third flight, will land on the drone ship ‘A Shortfall of Gravitas’ about eight and a half minutes into the flight.\
Our live coverage from Cape Canaveral, with commentary by Will Robinson-Smith, will begin about an hour before launch.\
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DARPA has tapped Raytheon to design and develop a wireless, airborne relay system to “deliver energy into contested environments,” as part of its Energy Web Dominance program, in which DARPA wants to be able to power anything from nearly anywhere.
Under a two-year, US$10 million DARPA contract, Raytheon will create a Persistent Optical Wireless Energy Relay (POWER) system, using a series of high altitude unmanned aircraft equipped with laser-based power receiving and transmitting capabilities. Energy will be beamed up to high altitude, then relayed across however many jumps are necessary to reach the target area.
That target might be on the ground, or it might itself be another autonomous aerial platform, in which case it could stay airborne as long as necessary, its batteries being constantly charged from afar.
By combining photonic and electronic components, scientists have built a prototype communications chip that can effectively access high enough radio frequency bandwidths for uses including advanced radar as well as 6G and 7G.
Researchers call it the ‘Holy Grail’ for physicists and engineers.
A group of researchers, led by Professor Chan Chi-hou from the City University of Hong Kong, created a special antenna that can control all five important aspects of electromagnetic waves using computer software.
The antenna, which they have named ’microwave universal metasurface antenna,’ is capable of dynamically, simultaneously, independently, and precisely manipulating all the essential properties of electromagnetic waves through software control.
“A universal component capable of manipulating all the fundamental wave properties is the Holy Grail for physicists and engineers,” said Professor Chan.
Project Kuiper seeks to deploy a swarm of small satellites into low Earth orbit (LEO) to enhance global broadband access, particularly to remote locations of the planet.
Amazon’s Project Kuiper initiative has marked a significant achievement with the successful in-orbit testing of a critical technology known as optical inter-satellite links (OISL).
Amazon had previously kept details of this technology confidential, but it has now been revealed that OISL enables laser communications between satellites.
The company revealed in a recent press release that this optical communication-based technology employs infrared lasers to transmit data between satellites in low-Earth orbit.
By Chuck Brooks
Realizing the potential of Smart Cities will require public-private cooperation and security by design.
The idea of smart cities is starting to take shape as the digital era develops. A city that has developed a public-private infrastructure to support waste management, energy, transportation, water resources, smart building technology, sustainability, security operations and citizen services is referred to as a “smart city”. Realizing the potential of Smart Cities will require public-private cooperation and security by design.
A smart city functions as an applied innovation lab. Automation, robotics, enabling nanotechnologies, artificial intelligence (human/computer interface), printed electronics and photovoltaics, wearables (flexible electronics), and information technologies like real-time and predictive analytics, super-computing, 5G wireless networks, secure cloud computing, mobile devices, and virtualization are a few of the fascinating technological trends of the digital era that are influencing the development of smart cities.
Starlink has around 5,000 satellites in orbit, far more than any other provider.
According to Cloudflare, Starlink’s internet traffic has nearly tripled in 2023 compared to 2022. In the US, the traffic has grown by 250%, while in Brazil, where Starlink launched last year, the traffic has surged by 1700%.
Bridging the divide, one satellite at a time
Imagine blazing fiber-optic speeds delivered not by cables but by a twinkling swarm of satellites in the sky. That’s the reach of Starlink, and it’s captivated over 50 countries, from Brazil’s staggering 17-fold traffic surge to Kenya’s newfound online access and countries like the Philippines, and Zambia. This exponential growth has cemented Starlink’s position as the undisputed king of satellite internet.
The company just coming out of stealth suggests its technology could be used by mining corporations and defense establishments.
Estimates suggest that 75 percent of enterprise data will be generated on the edge by 2025 and Armada is poised perfectly to address an upcoming need.