Terran Orbital Corporation has announced that its Pathfinder Technology Demonstrator 3 (PTD-3) satellite has enabled a successful 200 gigabits per second space-to-ground optical link. The satellite, developed by Terran Orbital, hosts the TeraByte InfraRed Delivery (TBIRD) payload, funded by NASA Space Communications and Navigation (SCaN) and developed by MIT Lincoln Laboratory. This technology breakthrough has the potential to revolutionize the space-based earth observation and synthetic aperture radar industries by offering a space-demonstrated solution to the data throughput bottlenecks that have historically limited their capabilities. Terran Orbital previously aided TBIRD’s data transmission of 1.4 terabytes of test data to a single ground station in a pass that lasted less than five minutes – a record breaker at the time in terms of both speed and data transmission quantity. The 200 gigabits per second space-to-ground optical link broke this record.
