TBIRD will hitch a ride to low-Earth-orbit on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Kennedy Space Center in Florida. After testing, the integrated spacecraft will be delivered to its launch site. To ensure performance, engineers replicate space through environmental chambers and facilities that confirm the integrated spacecraft'sfunctionality. As of February 2022, the TBIRD payload and spacecraft are integrated and going through environmental testing. During the delivery to Tyvak, the entire payload was able to fit into the overhead bins of a commercial aircraft with space to spare. TBIRD will be a hosted payload on the Pathfinder Technology Demonstration (PTD) 3 mission. Recently, they delivered the payload to Tyvak, a company that specializes in small spacecraft development and integration. The TBIRD team is preparing for its upcoming launch, anticipated for June 2022. With multiple passes a day at 200 Gbps, TBIRD will send back terabytes of data and give NASA more insight into the capabilities of lasers on small satellites. Laser communications will enable missions to send back more data in a single transmission. Today, NASA satellites rely on radio waves to send information to and from spacecraft. These rates are far greater than anything experienced on Earth. The tissue-box-sized CubeSat will demonstrate a direct-to-Earth laser communications link at 200 gigabits per second (Gbps). Launching this summer, the TeraByte InfraRed Delivery (TBIRD) system will follow in the footsteps of NASA’s Laser Communications Relay Demonstration (LCRD) and further the advancement of laser communications – also known as optical communications.
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