Optical and quantum

On the 8th and 9th June 2021, the 4th annual ScyLight workshop took place online. This year the annual event took place online due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Nonetheless, the event was attended by 284 attendees, totalling 382 registrations to the event, including national delegations, industrial representatives of ESA Member States, ESA staff members and academic researchers. It once more provided the opportunity to present outcomes of ongoing activities in industry, academia and agencies as well as the right occasion to provide an overview of on-going ESA activities under the ARTES 4.0 Strategic Programme Line Optical Communication - ScyLight. 

Project INDIGO, a flagship ESA Public Private Partnership (PPP), is wrapping up on a high note after five successful years and an impressive track record of commercial success. It’s the end of a project that has seen telecom services reach new and unserved satellite markets, greatly enhancing the customer value chain.  

Keeping information secure in today’s interconnected world is becoming ever more important, so ESA is supporting efforts to ensure that future communications are kept confidential.

The design for a series of telecommunications satellites that can be completely repurposed after launch has just been completed.

The standardised OneSat satellites for the highly competitive global commercial telecommunications market are software defined and fully reprogrammable in orbit. They are being developed as an ESA Partnership Project with manufacturer Airbus.

Flight passengers will soon be able to connect to their families and colleagues on Earth via low-orbit telecommunications satellites. They will develop in-flight connectivity terminals that will work over OneWeb’s constellation of low-Earth orbit satellites, as well as on geostationary satellite networks. OneWeb currently has 110 satellites in orbit but foresees a constellation of about 650.