SoylentNews

fritsd [soylentnews.org] writes:

BBC News reports that the main component of the European Data Relay System (EDRS) [wikipedia.org] was launched today [bbc.com] as part of the Eutelsat 9B communications satellite.

The satellite will take its place at 9°E in the Clarke belt, and besides its usual tasks of bouncing back various and sundry TV channels, it will also act as a receiver for laser-transmitted high-bandwidth data from lower (low-earth-orbit or otherwise) earth observation satellites. Then it will beam back this data to its earth ground stations, vi Ka-band microwave (no lasers pointed at the ground apparently).

The latency is expected to be 20 minutes, still better than internet-by-carrier-pigeon (and they can't fly so high), and the system is meant to give faster updates to earth observations such as ice floes, floodings, and other disasters that can be seen from space and change rapidly.

Original Submission