Impact of transmitter wavefront errors and pointing jitter on intersatellite free space optical communications
M. Badas Aldecocea (TU Delft - Space Systems Egineering)
J. Bouwmeester (TU Delft - Space Systems Egineering)
P. Piron (TU Delft - Spaceborne Instrumentation)
Jérôme Loicq (TU Delft - Spaceborne Instrumentation)
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Abstract
Intersatellite optical communication links will be crucial for the development of future global optical and quantum communication networks. Under the harsh space environment satellite optical terminals will suffer pointing jitter and wavefront errors. In this paper, the impact of the combination of these errors on the transmitter side is modeled. Combining the far-field diffraction patterns obtained through computational Fourier optics and the statistics of the pointing jitter, the received power statistics are derived numerically for different scenarios. The computational model is first used to evaluate the optimum nominal parameters of the transmitted beam. Then, several optical aberrations are added to the transmitted beam and their impact on the communication performance is evaluated through the average bit error rate.