ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the requirements that an optical communications terminal on ground has to fulfill to establish a bidirectional link with a terminal in space, on providing a design reference for such a ground terminal and draws on modeling and analyzing the performance of real ground-to-satellite optical links crossing the turbulent atmosphere. As compared to intersatellite links, ground-based satellite links are peculiar because part of them cross the Earth’s atmosphere. The specification about the required diameter will be given by the link budget for a space-to-ground link. To optimize the operational cost and resources of the ground station, all the controls of the instrumentation must be centralized in a main control computer (MCC). The MCC system is composed of a set of functional or logical modules that can be combined in different ways to perform all the different functions of the entire MCC System. Instrumentation balloons launched by meteorological institutes can provide important information for the evaluation of the link performance.
