Capella Space validated a Mynaric optical communications terminal on its newest satellite — the first time Capella has deployed an optical terminal.
Capella Space released the first synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images from its Acadia-10 satellite on Wednesday, after the satellite launched in March.
The satellite is currently demonstrating data transfer at 2.5 gigabits per second in onboard tests, Capella reported, enabling the satellite to downlink data more quickly, avoiding the wait for the satellite to make contact with a ground station.
“This near-real-time handoff bypasses the multi-hour ground station wait. The impact is profound; task-to-delivery timelines compress from hours down to minutes, fundamentally changing how organizations operationalize SAR data,” the company said in a blog post.
Capella first announced plans to put Mynaric OCTs onboard its satellites back in 2021. But future Acadia satellites will have Skyloom OCTs instead, Capella spokesperson Zoie Noone told Via Satellite. Both Capella and Skyloom are now owned by quantum company IonQ after acquisitions.
Both acquisitions tie in with IonQ’s goal to bring quantum networking to space. Capella satellites are set to be equipped with Skyloom OCT’s starting in 2027, Noone said.
The terminal on Acadia-10 is compatible with the Space Development Agency (SDA) OCT standard to communicate with the SDA’s proliferated Low-Earth Orbit (LEO) network. Capella has been working with the SDA since 2021. In April of this year, the SDA awarded Capella an award under HALO Europa Track 1 in April to design two satellites to demonstrate “advanced tactical waveform performance, adaptive beamforming, and secure tactical communications in LEO.”
Noone said that specific details on the tests with the SDA under the HALO agreement will come out at a later time.
There was significant engineering required to put an OCT on a Capella SAR satellite, which is on the larger end of commercial SAR satellites at 175 to 195 kg and 700 W of solar array power.
“The OCT had to be physically accommodated on a SAR satellite bus that already has demanding thermal, mechanical, and power constraints, and the pointing and scheduling logic had to be rebuilt around a payload that operates on different principles than an X-band downlink,” the company explained.
