A high-power Laser Transmitter Assembly (LTA) was developed to support the Deep Space Optical Communications (DSOC) technology demonstration being developed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. NASA’s Psyche Mission plans to host the DSOC flight subsystem for testing space-to-ground high-bandwidth laser communications en route to the 16-Psyche asteroid. We review the design, performance, and qualification of the LTA Engineering Model and Flight Model (EM and FM) delivered to JPL. The LTA uses a master-oscillator power amplifier (MOPA) design and delivers up to 4.5 W at 1550 nm, with a highly efficient, cladding-pumped, polarization-maintaining erbium-ytterbium fiber amplifier. The master oscillator generates a range of pulse widths and repetition rates to support modulation formats from 16- to 128-PPM for optical data transmission at <100 Mbps. The LTA was designed for high reliability and radiation hardness, and includes redundant signal and pumping paths to reduce single points of failure, hardware interlocks to ensure safe operation and protection against damage, closed-loop control of optical power, and detailed health and status via telemetry. The LTA EM and FM were subjected to unit-appropriate space qualification testing. We describe the performance testing of the EM and FM, for the characterization of key metrics such as wavelength stability, signal linewidth, optical pulse width, jitter, and extinction ratio, and polarization extinction ratio. The management of optical nonlinearities (selfphase modulation, Brillouin scattering, or pulse-to-pulse energy variation), which could result in an optical link penalty or damage to the LTA, is also detailed, and factors affecting the power efficiency are discussed.

We report on the design, development, and testing of the high-power Laser Transmitter Assembly (LTA) supporting the Deep Space Optical Communications (DSOC) demonstration hosted on the Psyche Discovery class mission, due to launch in 2022. The DSOC project, under development by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, will test space-to-ground high-bandwidth laser communications while en route to the Psyche-16 asteroid in the main asteroid belt, in what will be the longest range high rate optical communications link in history. The LTA is based on a master-oscillator power-amplifier optical architecture, using highly-efficient cladding-pumped amplification. The transmitter is designed to deliver average optical output powers <4 W at 1550 nm for low power consumption data links at <100 Mbps. The output signal operates across multiple pulse-position modulation (PPM) orders and pulse-widths to optimize the space-to-ground link. The architecture is designed for high-reliability and radiation hardness, and features hardware interlocks and secondary signal/pumping paths to reduce single points of failure. We also detail the effective management of optical nonlinearities which could damage the LTA or impact the communications link. These include the suppression of stimulated Brillouin scattering, self-phase modulation, and pulseto- pulse energy variation (PEV), which arises from the gain dynamics of the power amplifier, and will manifest when the LTA is configured for large pulse energies and long inter-pulse delays. The LTA also incorporates hardware and software controls to enable autonomous operation, including closed-loop control of intra-stage and output power levels, modulator bias control, and detailed reporting of LTA status through telemetry.

We demonstrate logic functionalities in a high-speed all-optical logic circuit based on differential Mach-Zehnder interferometers with semiconductor optical amplifiers as the nonlinear optical elements. The circuit, implemented by hybrid integration of the semiconductor optical amplifiers on a planar lightwave circuit platform fabricated in silica glass, can be flexibly configured to realize a variety of Boolean logic gates. We present both simulations and experimental demonstrations of cascaded all-optical operations for 80-Gb/s on-off keyed data.