INDUSTRIAL ELECTRONICS
The way ahead when commercialising space optics
Paul Townley-Smith, director of design & prototyping at Zygo Electro Optics discuses an optical solution for commercial space applications
hen considering space optics, what often comes to mind are one-off, eye- wateringly expensive high-performance projects such as the Hubble Space Telescope or the NRO Geospatial Intelligence constellation.
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Failure of the space optics used in such applications would be a mortal blow to national security and science objectives.
There is only one shot at success, and such optics are engineered with redundancy in mind. They require extensive engineering analysis to validate the extreme edges of operating conditions and also require extensive subsystem and prototype qualification. Commercial space optics systems, on the
other hand, are targeted at higher quantity and lower-cost applications and are, therefore, systems where the cost of failure is not so extreme. While not ideal, the failure of a satellite is not the death knell for a particular project, and so the commercial space industry can afford to be a little more pragmatic and can tolerate more risk than conventional one-off programs.
For commercial space applications, best practices plus “learning and discovery” replace the extensive analysis and qualification testing needed for super critical applications. Risk is managed through small incremental changes made over multiple launches of short-lived
14 JUNE 2021 | ELECTRONICS TODAY
satellites, for example, and instrumentation and self-diagnostic data are used extensively to understand what works and what doesn’t.
The commercial approach to space optics
Today, there are three main areas of the NewSpace optics business, namely laser communication, star tracking, and earth imaging. In some circumstances, a satellite may possess all three of these payloads. In each of these areas, typically the satellite maker needs to choose between contracting out a custom-optics payload and integrating it into their own satellite designs or making it themselves. A typical satellite in a large
communications constellation will have four laser communication transceivers, two in- plane, and two cross-plane. Each transceiver is composed of a large beam expander optic on the front end with smaller beam management and fibre-coupling optics in the back end.
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