NASA’s New Data Communication System Is Faster Than Your Internet, And It Works In Space – SlashGear

While the TeraByte InfraRed Delivery system uses a laser, you aren’t going to see red beams of light firing down from the heavens like something out of Star Wars. As the name suggests, the device relies on invisible infrared beams which won’t harm your eyes, encoding data into the oscillations of light waves in the laser it uses. When it is time to transmit, TBIRD beams its data down across multiple infrared wavelengths to maximize the amount of data that can be sent. While it is still an electromagnetic wave, infrared light has much higher frequencies than radio waves, allowing more data to be transmitted. TBIRD can achieve a data transfer rate 2,000 times higher than what can be achieved with radio waves.

TBIRD is the size of a regular tissue box and is housed inside NASA’s Pathfinder Technology Demonstrator 3 CubeSat, launched into space on May 25, 2022, and is the size of two stacked cereal boxes. The PTD-3 uses reaction wheels to ensure the TBIRD is correctly oriented to transmit data down to the ground station at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California.

Due to the hyper-directionality of laser communications and the impacts atmospheric effects and weather conditions can have on the transmission, the ground station also employs an internally developed protocol to tell TBIRD which data it received correctly so that the satellite can resend only the frames which weren’t received, saving time and energy.