ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses design drivers; design trades; link budgets for acquisition, tracking, and pointing; and communications links. Establishments of customer requirements, design constraints (such as mass, power, and size) placed on the flight laser communication transceiver, and flight environmental requirements (shock, vibration, thermal, and particularly cosmic radiation) are design drivers that a lasercom system engineer has to tackle and are discussed in this chapter. Communications link budgets driven by the desired link budget and bit error rate (among other factors) play an important role in defining any end-to-end communications link. The acquisition and tracking link budgets are equally critical in order to accomplish the link successfully. Requirements on the ground terminal subsystem, including its transceiver, and modeling of the optical channel involved in the link are among the subjects covered in this chapter.
