Final demonstration results of OPTIMA, photonic payload for telecommunication satellites

One of the main challenges in space communication has always been attempting to meet the demanding requirement for greater capacity and routing complexity associated with Very High Throughput Satellite (VHTS) missions. Increased amounts of hardware associated with such high capacity mission pushes the payload towards limitation in mass, power consumption, thermal dissipation and accommodation on the spacecraft. This paper describes activities and the final demonstration results of the OPTIMA project. OPTIMA is funded by the EU commission under Horizon 2020, COMPET-2-2016, maturing satellite communication technologies. The objective of the OPTIMA project was to demonstrate and validate the concept of significantly improving the SWaP of VHTS payloads by defining and developing a photonic payload hardware demonstrator based on various photonic equipment building blocks and testing the demonstrator to TRL 6. Since photonic technology is not yet mature for use in the space environment, the OPTIMA project developed and environmentally tested to TRL 6 the necessary photonic devices and hardware payload equipment. Benefits offered from the use of photonic technology in VHTS payload architectures have shown significant mass saving. This comes not only from reduced equipment unit mass but also from a lower number of units required as a consequence of implementing photonic technology. There are also additional benefits, including reduced DC power consumption and improved power dissipation. The OPTIMA demonstrator is based on Ka-band frequency; however, a holistic approach has been taken when deriving equipment specifications by considering VHTS payload requirements as a whole to ensure the demonstrator will lead to technology developments that can easily scale up in terms of frequencies (such as Q/V band) and use in a wide range of VHTS payload architectures. During the early part of the OPTIMA project, the specification of each building block has been established with emphasis on RF and optical performance, mass, footprint, power consumption, power dissipation and cost. The OPTIMA project aims to provide a strong initial impulse to the photonic payloads for telecommunication satellites by focusing the efforts of various industrial and academic actors from the European photonic and space landscape towards the concrete goal of demonstrating the validity of the photonic payload concept.