Optical link design and validation testing of the Optical Payload for Lasercomm Science (OPALS) system

The Optical Payload for Lasercomm Science (OPALS) system developed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, will be used for optical telecommunications link experiments from the International Space Station (ISS) to a ground telescope located at Table Mountain, CA. The launch of the flight terminal is scheduled for late February 2014 with an initially planned 90-day operations period following deployment on the exterior of the ISS. The simple, low-cost OPALS system will downlink a pre-encoded video file at 50 Mb/s on a 1550 nm laser carrier using on-off key (OOK) modulation and Reed-Solomon forward error correction. A continuous wave (cw) 976 nm multibeam laser beacon transmitted from the ground to the ISS will initiate link acquisition and tracking by the flight subsystem. Link analysis along with pre-flight results of the end-to-end free-space testing of the OPALS link are presented.