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NASA invited the media to watch as it streamed the first 4K video from an aircraft to the International Space Station and back on July 24.
A team at NASA’s Glenn Research Center in Cleveland worked alongside NASA’s Small Business Innovation Research Program and the Air Force Research Lab to test new technology that could one day be used to provide 4K live video coverage of Artemis Moon landings.
Laser communications, which transmit ten to 100 times more data than radio waves, were used to send the data to Deep Space and back. A portable laser terminal was installed on the underside of a Pilatus PC-12 plane which flew over Lake Eerie and sent data to an optical ground station in Cleveland.
From there, data was transmitted via an Earth-based network to NASA’s White Sands Test Facility in Las Cruces, New Mexico.
Scientists used infrared light signals to send the data 22,000 miles from Earth to NASA’s Laser Communications Relay Demonstration (LCRD) which relayed signals to the ILLUMA-T (Integrated LCRD LEO User Modem and Amplifier Terminal) payload. This in turn sent data back to Earth.
Testing in Flight for Cost-Efficiency and Functionality
Testing the space technology in flight allowed the team to identify issues more readily than ground testing, with the researchers improving the tech’s functionality after each flight test. Not only is this more cost effective than testing in space, but testing in flight also ensures new ideas are more likely to make it out of the lab and into production.
A new system developed at Glenn, High-Rate Delay Tolerant Networking (HDTN), also helped the infrared light signals to penetrate cloud coverage.
Principal investigator for the HDTN project at Glenn, Dr. Daniel Raible, called this a “tremendous accomplishment” and spoke of building on the experiments’ success to allow for Artemis astronauts to use HD video conferencing in future.
Though the ILLUMA-T payload has since been removed from the Space Station, researchers are still testing 4K video streaming capabilities from the PC-12 aircraft for the remainder of July in hopes of developing technology allowing astronauts to livestream in 4K on their return to the lunar surface in future Artemis missions.
