The Terabyte InfraRed Delivery (TBIRD) program will establish a communication link from a nanosatellite in low-Earth orbit to a ground station at burst rates up to 200 Gbps. The TBIRD payload is currently in the process of integrating with the 6-U CubeSat host bus and pre-flight testing has been completed. An overview of the pointing, acquisition, and tracking system for TBIRD is provided as well as a summary of results from pre-flight testing. TBIRD relies on the spacecraft bus to implement fine pointing corrections supplied by its quad sensor at a rate of 10 Hz. The measured accuracy of pointing feedback is about 10 μrad RMS per axis. A custom optical assembly was designed for transmitter/receiver alignment stability which was measured to be within 25 μrad two-axis through environmental testing. With TBIRD feedback in the loop, single axis pointing accuracy of the downlink is predicted to be about 30 μrad RMS.


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    Title :

    Pointing, acquisition, and tracking for the TBIRD CubeSat mission: system design and pre-flight results



    Conference:

    Free-Space Laser Communications XXXIV ; 2022 ; San Francisco,California,United States


    Published in:

    Proc. SPIE ; 11993


    Publication date :

    2022-03-04





    Type of media :

    Conference paper


    Type of material :

    Electronic Resource


    Language :

    English




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