WASHINGTON — The Air Force Research Laboratory has ordered a Viasat-3 space terminal that will probably be used to show communications services for low-Earth orbit spacecraft.
Viasat will deliver a space-qualified Ka-band terminal that will probably be launched to orbit on a LEO satellite and function a knowledge communications relay to the ViaSat-3 network.
AFRL will use the terminal for prime data rate LEO-to-GEO communications, said Lt. Col. David Johnson, head of the lab’s Integrated Experiments and Evaluations Division.
Viasat received a $10 million task order from AFRL for the Viasat-3 space terminal, Johnson said in an announcement to .
The duty order is a component of a seven-year contract price as much as $50 million that AFRL awarded Viasat in 2020 for satellite communications technologies and services.
Satellite operator Viasat on April 30 launched the primary of three planned Viasat-3 Ka-band broadband satellites
Data transfer via Viasat-3
LEO satellites that collect Earth statement data, for instance, would use Viasat’s space relay service to send data through the Viasat-3 high-throughput satellite.
“Having the persistent capability to speak to LEO spacecraft by relaying through a constellation of spacecraft in geosynchronous Earth orbit can enable the power to take care of almost near constant communication with those LEO spacecraft,” Johnson said.
The relay service using the Viasat-3 satellite, “once proven, would enable reduced response time for mission-tasking or spacecraft anomalies and frees up bandwidth on government ground communications assets,” he said.
AFRL’s project, Johnson said, is “focused on providing 24-7 persistent command and control capabilities to LEO spacecraft by utilizing GEO constellations which are all the time in view of ground stations.”
Viasat in a June 7 news release said the AFRL mission will probably be the primary pathfinder demonstration of the corporate’s space relay service expected to turn into available in late 2025.
Along with a Ka-band space relay payload, Viasat will provide engineering evaluation, integration and test support for the on-orbit demonstration.
Craig Miller, president of Viasat Government Systems, said this “real-time space relay capability will offer an efficient approach to moving LEO satellite data to the bottom for operations.”
