The goal: to enable, among other things, the rapid transfer of images from disaster areas
The European Space Agency has successfully completed the first test of an innovative system for transmitting many images from satellites to Earth using laser beams.
This is the first test of the system, which is planned to cost almost half a billion euros and is supposed to allow the extremely fast transfer of a situation picture from disaster areas, photographs for weather forecasts and a lot of other information. In the next two years, the European Space Agency is supposed to launch two dedicated satellites for the program, which will reduce the dependence on proximity to a certain ground station and will allow a wider photographic area to be covered.
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heat
Everything you said is true. In addition - the transparency of the atmosphere depends on the wavelength, and it is possible that the air is more transparent at the laser frequency.
Thanks for the explanation, sounds reasonable.
1) The frequency of the laser is relatively high compared to the frequency of radio waves.
A laser frequency of 1500 nanometers compared to a high radio frequency of 1 millimeter
Allows the transfer of a file of 1 megabyte compared to a file of 1 kilobyte in the same unit of time.
(for example, I'm not an expert on the subject)
Secondly, I think there is a matter of dispersion.
Radio scatters in waves Laser is also a wave but relatively more focused (scatters less),
And thirdly, I think less energy is required to produce the laser
vs. the radio production (operating derived from the focus of the laser vs. the dispersion of the radio)
And again I am neither a physicist nor a mathematician
And how is it better than normal radio waves? After all, they also move at the speed of light, don't they?