SPACE – METASPACE

Space Situational Awareness is one of the major topics of the New Space Era. Sometimes referred to as space surveillance, it involves activities keeping track of natural and artificial objects in the space around the Earth, predicting when and where these object will be; charting the present position of these objects and plot their anticipated orbital paths; detecting new man-made objects in space; producing a catalogue of these objects.

SPACE SITUATION AWARENESS

Space Surveillance and tracking refers to the activities of detecting, tracking, and estimating the orbit of, identify, and catalog asteroids, satellites, and space debris, including natural space objects.

Optical surveillance observation of space surveillance is similar to that of astronomical research due to the fact that space objects, both natural and artificial, reflect sunlight and are detectable using optical telescopes.

Metaspace provides optimal observation systems for SST, while developing data reduction and analysis softwares.

우주감시 및 추적

SPACE SURVEILLANCE AND TRACKING (SST)

우주측지용 레이저 추적시스템

SATELLITE LASER RANGING

Satellite laser ranging is a proven geodetic technique with significant potential for important contributions to scientific studies of the earth/atmosphere/ocean system. A global network of observation stations measures the round trip time of flight of ultrashort pulses of light to satellites equipped with retroreflectors. This provides instantaneous range measurements of millimeter level precision which can be accumulated to provide accurate measurement of orbits and a host of important scientific data. The laser pulse can also be reflected by the surface of a satellite without a retroreflector, which is used for tracking space debris.

우주기상

SPACE WEATHER

Space weather is a branch of space physics which concerns with the time varying conditions within the Solar Systems, emphasizing the space surrounding the Earth, including conditions in the magnetosphere, ionosphere, thermosphere, and exosphere.The most influential figure is our star, Sun. Therefore, a lot of activities of space weather monitoring involve observing the Solar activities and their effects around the Earth.
Metaspace develops and provides observation and data analysis systems for diverse space weather programs.

Satellite optical communication utilizes free-space optical communication (FSO) which uses light propagating in free space to wirelessly transmit data for telecommunications with satellites. “Free space” means air, outer space, vacuum, or something similar.

SATELLITE OPTICAL COMMUNICATION

자유공간 광통신

Free SPACE lASER cOMMUNICATION

Laser communication is considered the future of communications and both New Space Era entities and satellite constellation operators will benefit from it.

Contrast to traditional radio-band emissions, the fast approaching technology of the laser communications will allow a faster communication speed, a definitely increased efficiency of the links, with less required power per transmitted bit, a more secured transmission of digital data and contents.

Laser communication is rapidly becoming the technology capable of interconnecting satellites, aircrafts and drones. While on the ground, it is one of the very few options to interconnect every place on Earth with high data throughput based applications. Now laser communication along with quantum optical communications, is rapidly evolving, thanks to the large investments made by telecommunications operators worldwide.

Metaspace develops and provides optimal systems for satellite ground-stations and their control systems.

The Low-Cost Optical Terminal (LCOT) credit : NASA

적응광학

ADAPTIVE OPTICS

Adaptive optics (AO) is a technology used to improve the performance of optical systems by reducing the effect of incoming wavefront distortions by deforming a mirror in order to compensate for the distortion. It is used in astronomical telescopes and laser communication systems to remove the effects of atmospheric distortion, in microscopy, optical fabrication and in retinal imaging systems to reduce optical aberrations. Adaptive optics works by measuring the distortions in a wavefront and compensating for them with a device that corrects those errors such as a deformable mirror or a liquid crystal array.

One of the major advantages of satellite optical communication is efficiency due to characteristics of optical laser. However, it suffers from atmospheric turbulence just like astronomical observation. To make laser communication efficiency better and stable, laser communication modules used for uplink and downlink can take advantage of AO technology.

Metaspace develops AO instruments along with Seoul National University. These instruments will be utilized for satellite optical communications as well as astronomical observation of various objects.