UK armed forces aims for secure comms via optical satellite links

Britain is testing deployable optical satellite links to provide faster and more secure communications for armed forces. Field trials funded by the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory used a small, lightweight optical ground station from Archangel Lightworks. The TERRA-M unit can be transported by ground vehicle or aircraft and can be installed on a building roof. During a single 90-second pass of a low Earth orbit satellite, many gigabytes of data were downloaded. The system uses short-wave infrared lasers that are non-visible to the human eye, making interception and detection harder than with conventional radio frequency beams. It is designed to interoperate with emerging satellite laser communication standards, is software defined, and can be reconfigured pass by pass. The unit supports up to 10 Gbps and could scale to terabit-per-second downlinks.

"Britain is looking to deploy high-speed optical satellite links for its armed forces, with the aim of providing faster and more secure comms for personnel on operations. The UK's Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (Dstl) says it has completed field trials it funded involving downloads of data from space with a "deployable" optical ground station from UK firm Archangel Lightworks."

""Deployable" here means that the unit in question - the TERRA-M - is small and light enough to be transported by a ground vehicle or aircraft to where it is needed, and it can be sited on the roof of a building. According to Dstl, "many gigabytes" of data were downloaded from a satellite in low Earth orbit (LEO) during a single 90-second satellite pass. The demonstration provides a way for faster and more secure communications for the UK's armed forces, it said."

"Archangel Lightworks told us its tech is based on short-wave infra-red lasers, which are non-visible to the human eye. This makes communications difficult for an adversary to detect and intercept compared with a more conventional radio frequency beam. The system was designed to be interoperable with emerging satellite laser communication standards and terminals, and is software defined, allowing the use of different protocols."

"It can be reconfigured on a pass-by-pass basis if required, a spokesperson told us. Each unit is just over a meter (about 3.5 ft) tall and 0.7 m (2.3 ft) in diameter, making it "a fraction of the size of traditional optical ground stations," Archangel claims. The system can transmit and receive data at up to 10 Gbps, and could in future scale to terabit-per-second (Tbps) downlinks, we're told."

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