Laser Space Communications (Artech House Space Technology and Applications)

This groundbreaking resource is the first book to offer you a thorough, practical treatment of laser space communications. The book focuses on the feasibility of laser space communication links between satellites, satellites and airborne platforms, and satellites and ground based stations to achieve worldwide connectivity. You get expert guidance on weather avoidance approaches and adaptive antenna subsystems that help mitigate the effects of turbulence. The book presents simplified, yet highly accurate, engineering expressions of complex mathematics of turbulence that provide you with numerical values in the links?signal power budget. Moreover, you find an entire chapter devoted to noise photons and their effect on the bit error rate.

This comprehensive volume covers a wide range of critical topics you need to understand for your work in the field, from a discussion on laser vs. RF communications in space, basic design features of a laser transceiver, and configuration of inter-satellite communication links, to selection of ground station locations, 5^th Generation Internet (5-GENIN), and signal modulation schemes. The book is supported with over 70 illustrations and more than 100 equations.

Table of Contents:

Laser versus RF Communications in Space. Basic Configuration of Inter-Satellite Communication Links. Basic Design Features of a Laser Transceiver. Basic Configuration of Satellite to Ground and Ground Station to Satellite Links. Effect of Turbulence and Weather. Mitigation of Turbulence Using Adaptive Antennas. Selection of Ground Station Locations. The 5-GENIN (5^th Generation Internet) System, Including Weather Avoidance. Laser Links between Satellite Backbone and Different Airborne Platforms. Signal Modulation Schemes: Pulse Gated Binary Modulation, Polarization Binary Modulation, and Others. Examples of Laser Communication between Earth and Mars and Other Planets. Examples of Space Based Passive Reflectors for Relaying Laser Communication Beams. Calculations of Bit Error Rate Based on Different Links?Noise Environment.