Firooz Aflatouni, the Skirkanich Assistant Professor of Electrical and Systems Engineering in Penn’s School of Engineering and Applied Science, has been awarded a NASA Early Stage Innovations grant to design and implement arrays of optical antennas that can enable laser communication in near-Earth satellites, which will be more efficient and carry far more information than microwaves.

This NASA Early Stage Innovation grant of $500,000 aims “to accelerate the development of groundbreaking, high-risk/high-payoff space technologies to support the future space science and exploration needs of NASA, other government agencies and the commercial space sector.”

When a ground station fires microwaves to a near-Earth satellite, the microwaves lose a lot of energy and diverge before arriving at the intended satellite. Aiming at a relatively tiny, constantly moving target from thousands of miles away, only a small amount of the microwave signal reaches its intended destination. This limits the range and the amount of information microwaves can carry. Soon, microwaves may not be able to transmit data fast enough to keep up with rapidly evolving consumer demand.

Dr. Aflatouni aims to improve this system and will design precise laser emitters capable of sharing up to 10GB of data per second between satellites. His research will be conducted in Penn’s Electronic Photonic Microsystems Lab.

One of the many benefits of this technology will be the ability to send videos in less than a fraction of a second thanks to the high data rate capabilities. This can potentially speed up everything from ultra HD streaming to cloud and distributed computing.