The European Space Agency (ESA), Netherlands Organization for Applied Scientific Research (TNO), and German payload manufacturer TESAT have created the world's first gigabit per second laser link between an aircraft and a geostationary satellite. In a blog post from ESA, a transmission of 2.6 Gbps was achieved for several minutes with zero errors.
The test was conducted in Nimes, France, using an aircraft terminal connected to the Alphasat TDP-1 satellite orbiting Earth 36,000 km above the surface. ESA reports that achieving accuracy at such a distance — with a fast-moving aircraft, while dealing with clouds and changes in atmospheric conditions — is a huge challenge.
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