The image from the satellite was first transmitted via a gigabit laser channel to Earth.

The European Space Agency (ESA) reported that, for the first time, the image from the Sentinel-1 satellite in Earth orbit was successfully transmitted to Earth using the Alphasat communications satellite for the first time in the European Data Relay System program. Gbit / s The transfer was based on the Laser Communication Terminal (LCT) technology developed by Airbus Defense and Space in collaboration with the German Aerospace Center DLR.

The satellite-carrying satellite Sentinel-1, which is in Earth orbit, established a connection with the communication satellite Alphasat, which, in turn, is in geostationary orbit. The latter successfully transferred the resulting image from Sentinel-1 to the ground data center. The transfer rate was 0.6 Gbit / s with a potential rate of 1.8 Gbit / s on the channel. The distance between the LCT data nodes was 45,000 km.

Sentinel-1 was launched on April 3 of this year, while Alphasat - the largest telecommunications satellite in Europe - has been in geostationary orbit since July 2013. It installed a communication device LST, which was already successfully tested in November last year with an ESA ground station in Tenerife.
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The fact of successful testing of communication between two satellites in different orbits solves two important problems: on the one hand, the data transfer speed allows you to transmit about 6 terabytes of information to Earth daily, on the other hand, since the satellite performs transmission in a higher orbit, this allows you to conduct transmission for a longer time, since the ground station will be in the “visibility zone” longer.

Colorful HD-movie released by ESA specifically for the event can be viewed below: