AFFRESCO

Objectives of the Product

AFFRESCO aimed at underpinning the developments of MBRYONICS’ StarCom Optical Communication Terminal.

StarCom hyper-hemispherical gimbal pointing optical head is the lowest SWaP to data rate and link distance in the LEO class and highest performing on the market (<11 kg). This is due to its unique freeform mirror telescope with large unobstructed aperture (124mm clear aperture), accompanied by its lightweight course pointing assembly design. The large aperture not only provides a significant, and unobstructed, light collecting area, but its transmit divergence is tighter resulting in longer ranges for same transmit power, or accordingly lesser power requirements for standard shorter-range links.  The same OCT is capable of ranges spanning from LEO-LEO, LEO-MEO and LEO-GEO with data rates from SDA v4 2.5G to ESTOL 100G.

AFFRESCO addresses the provision of a high-data-rate (more than 100 Gbps) satellite optical transport network for linking future Earth observation (EO) satellite constellations, to give a low-latency path to distributed optical ground stations. It does this by integrating both the ground and space segment optical free space communication hardware and network layers.

AFFRESCO advances a satellite constellation SDN modem designed for real-time data transport, combined with ultra-lightweight and mass-producible optical inter-satellite and direct-to-Earth link terminal in preparation for an in-orbit demonstration.

In addition to the hardware and networking, AFFRESCO also critically addresses the concept of operations needed to deliver a reliable and commercial service level agreement for optical data transport.

The goal is to support the seamless transfer of data from the space segment to ground – data streaming – for increased access to high-resolution and low-latency EO data.

AFFRESCO’s high level activities included:

• Optical and optomechanical design and manufacture of a freeform reflective telescope for free space optical communications in low Earth orbit.
• Design and manufacture of packaging (thermal, mechanical, electrical) for photonics integrated circuits for free space optical communication systems.
• Development of control electronics and electronic interfaces to the satellite bus.

Customers and their Needs

Future EO networks and constellations are looking for lower latency and reliable delivery of data to allow near-real-time actionable insights, in addition to the vast increase in data being collected by high-resolution and multi-spectral science instruments. Current instruments have to discard, or highly compress, most of the data collected due to the downlink bottleneck. This happens in a ground station network that is already at capacity with more than 40 000 EO satellite downlink passes per day, resulting in prohibitive costs for associated ground station services and driving up the costs of EO-based products and services. If the future of the EO market is for commoditised services and integrated applications, then a paradigm shift in efficiencies throughout the entire data chain is required.

AFFRESCO addresses future novel EO and telecom constellation dynamic topologies with inter-satellite links to enable continuous real-time access to an optical ground segment, with link fault-tolerant routing. This also increases the downlink time, enabling higher downlink time and ultimately throughput and reliability with fewer globally distributed optical ground stations. The additional benefit is optimising terrestrial transport for distributed storage in data centres.

The hardware to flexibly adapt to the customers’ needs and different topologies is designed to be software-definable, so it can adapt even after it is deployed to meet evolving service needs.

Targeted customer/users’ countries

AFFRESCO covers the provision of service and hardware.

The space segment hardware is currently being developed for customers in both Europe and the USA.

The optical ground segment service is being rolled out in conjunction with our ground station operator partner which has the largest global ground station network.

Product description

AFFRESCO has two key hardware components for the space segment end-user customers. That space segment hardware is developed to work with MBRYONICS’ optical ground station terminal.

The modem allows for intra- and inter-satellite network switching to grant the handover of multiple optical satellite terminals and enable real-time optical transport networking of constellations for low-latency data transfer.

 

The fibre-coupled optical terminal uses a low-mass gimbal for course mechanical beam steering with a field of view for different satellite network topologies, including low-elevation optical downlinks. The fibre coupling allows the use of fibre-coupled photonics, enabling multiplexing for scalable data channels to be added as needed by the end user.

The image above shows StarCom and its gimbal mechanism.

Added Value

Particularly for EO, augmenting ground station visibility with inter-satellite links dramatically increases throughput and enables real-time data access. This also allows for improved link reliability with dynamic optical transport routing, traffic coordination, and orchestration. This leads to reduced ground segment infrastructure CAPEX and reduced terrestrial long-haul OPEX by routing data to the ground station closest to the data centre.

Current status

AFFRESCO officially kicked off in 2019 and was completed in 2025.