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Starlink's laser system is beaming 42 petabytes of data per day

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Re: Starlink's laser system is beaming 42 petabytes of data per day

#11

Post by ortusdux »

ble wrote: post #5

My understanding of the state of the art of inter-satellite optical links is that they have only been used between satellites that are basically in the same orbital plane and in more or less the same orbit. That is, the angle from one satellite to the other changes very very slowly, so that the optics don't have to do much tracking -- and consequently satellites can only form an optical link with other satellites tha…

> “Another really fun fact is that we held a link all the way down to 122 kilometers while we were de-orbiting a satellite,” he said. “And we were able to downstream the video.”

> For the future, SpaceX plans on expanding its laser system so that it can be ported and installed on third-party satellites. The company has also explored beaming the satellite lasers directly to terminals on the Earth’s surface to deliver data.

Re: Starlink's laser system is beaming 42 petabytes of data per day

#12

Post by ugjka »

mschuster91 wrote: post #6

> The lasers, which can sustain a 100Gbps connection per link > Brashears also said Starlink’s laser system was able to connect two satellites over 5,400 kilometers (3,355 miles) apart. The link was so long “it cut down through the atmosphere, all the way down to 30 kilometers above the surface of the Earth,” he said, before the connection broke. How do these tiny satellites achieve this kind of accuracy and link qua…

Given this is Gen3 and Gen4 now being launched, it took some figuring out

Re: Starlink's laser system is beaming 42 petabytes of data per day

#13

Post by sumtechguy »

mschuster91 wrote: post #6

> The lasers, which can sustain a 100Gbps connection per link > Brashears also said Starlink’s laser system was able to connect two satellites over 5,400 kilometers (3,355 miles) apart. The link was so long “it cut down through the atmosphere, all the way down to 30 kilometers above the surface of the Earth,” he said, before the connection broke. How do these tiny satellites achieve this kind of accuracy and link qua…

Relative to the origin satellite I would assume the others are in a fairly fixed position to it. Remember they try to keep them spaced out and even coverage. That means the things are not moving around wildly relative to each other. But to us they are wizzing by. For example I know I am relatively moving fairly quickly to the earths core and pretty fast around the center of the sun. But from my PoV everything around me looks stationary. Also there is not a lot of dirt up there.

Re: Starlink's laser system is beaming 42 petabytes of data per day

#14

Post by 7e »

Global internet traffic is estimated to be 3 yottabytes per day. So Starlink is now carrying one of out every 77 million parts of worldwide traffic. Wow, that's small.

EDIT: there's some confusion information out there. With a more conservative estimate of 150.7 exabytes per month, Starlink gets 1 part of 119, which is more impressive.

Re: Starlink's laser system is beaming 42 petabytes of data per day

#16

Post by aPoCoMiLogin »

1oooqooq wrote: post #15

[flagged]

so you are asking if the traffic is additionally encrypted? i don't think that additional encryption is needed, like your ISP doesn't additionally encrypt your TLS encrypted traffic, that would be waste of resources

Re: Starlink's laser system is beaming 42 petabytes of data per day

#17

Post by uoaei »

7e wrote: post #14

Global internet traffic is estimated to be 3 yottabytes per day. So Starlink is now carrying one of out every 77 million parts of worldwide traffic. Wow, that's small. EDIT: there's some confusion information out there. With a more conservative estimate of 150.7 exabytes per month, Starlink gets 1 part of 119, which is more impressive.

The quoted number is only for inter-satellite laser links, not for other methods of information transmission.

Re: Starlink's laser system is beaming 42 petabytes of data per day

#20

Post by Symmetry »

ble wrote: post #5

My understanding of the state of the art of inter-satellite optical links is that they have only been used between satellites that are basically in the same orbital plane and in more or less the same orbit. That is, the angle from one satellite to the other changes very very slowly, so that the optics don't have to do much tracking -- and consequently satellites can only form an optical link with other satellites tha…

Right. The Iridium network had communication between satellites in different orbital planes passing each other but that was a pretty unusual capability.
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