Design and performance of a 40W uplink laser transmitter for NASA’s O2O laser communications mission

NASA’s Orion Artemis II Optical Communications System (O2O) will provide operational laser communications between the ground and lunar orbit for the Artemis II crewed mission. In this work we describe a 40 W ground-based laser transmitter for the O2O system. The uplink transmitter operates in the optical C-band and uses an energy-efficient 32- PPM modulation format. Four spatial diversity channels are time-aligned and combined in the far field. Each channel produces up to 10 W of output power and contains both the communications signal and the 7 kHz modulated beacon signal required for acquisition. The transmitter delivers data at 10 Mbits/s and 20 Mbits/s channel rates, corresponding to the 250 MHz and 500 MHz slot rates respectively.