Research · Ars Technica
During most of the Artemis II mission, the crew of four astronauts beamed back low-definition video
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This is because Orion largely communicated with Earth via radio waves, picked up by large dishes sprinkled around the world.
Key facts
- Quantum Opus was co-founded by physicist Josh Cassada, who became a NASA astronaut in 2013 and then retired more than a decade later to rejoin Quantum Opus
- For example, on Orion, the S-band transmitter required 5 to 20 watts of power, compared to the laser communications transmitter, which used a single watt
- Engineers from NASA field centers in Ohio and Maryland purchased an off-the-shelf 70 cm telescope from Observable Space and a backend to process the lasers from Quantum Opus
- NASA’s primary ground stations for optical communications on Artemis II were telescopes at the White Sands Complex in Las Cruces, New Mexico, and the Table Mountain Facility in California
Summary
During most of the Artemis II mission, the crew of four astronauts beamed back low-definition video, both from inside the spacecraft and from exterior views of the Moon. However, unlike Apollo, the astronauts on Orion would periodically send batches of much higher-resolution data, including the stunning photographs of the far side of the Moon and the Solar eclipse observed from there. Apollo returned data to Earth at about 50KB per second using radio frequencies. NASA has previously experimented with laser communications from the Moon with the Lunar Atmosphere Dust Environment Explorer mission a little more than a decade ago, and later a demonstration from the International Space Station as well as the Psyche spacecraft from deep space.