Europe’s hunt for secure, high-capacity satellite communications infrastructure has produced a laser-equipped mountaintop ground station in northern Greece.
Lithuanian space and defence outfit Astrolight said it has commissioned a new optical ground station in Greece. The station will support ESA-backed CubeSat missions testing laser communications between satellites and Earth.
The Holomondas Optical Ground Station was built through the PeakSat project. Aristotle University of Thessaloniki led the work, with backing from the European Space Agency and Greece’s Ministry of Digital Governance.
Its job is to receive data from satellites through infrared laser links. That replaces the radio systems space operators have leaned on for decades.
PeakSat and ERMIS-3 are two Greek CubeSats launched in March under ESA’s wider Greek IOD/IOV mission programme. Both carry Astrolight’s ATLAS-1 optical communication terminal.
Astrolight built the ground segment too, giving the project a fully integrated end-to-end optical communications setup.
Astrolight chief executive Laurynas Mačiulis said the company originally pursued laser communications after concluding it would need to tap into the optical spectrum as demand for satellite bandwidth continues to grow.
Mačiulis described optical connectivity as “one of the enabling technologies for further expansion into space.”
The company said the station uses an 808-nanometre laser beacon and an optical C-band receiver. It can receive data at up to 2.5Gbps. Unlike traditional RF systems, optical links use tightly focused infrared beams. These are harder to intercept or jam, while supporting much higher throughput.
The engineering problem is a bit trickier than waving a laser pointer at the sky.
“You have two moving objects that try to establish a laser link, which means trying to point a very, very narrow laser pointer at your object, which is potentially tens of thousands of kilometres away, moving at eight kilometres per second,” Mačiulis said.
ESA and its partners are pitching optical comms partly as an answer to an increasingly stuffed radio spectrum. The technology is attracting defence and dual-use operators hunting for more resilient communications systems.
“There is a need for networking in space, both for connectivity and tactical reasons, and dual-use defense applications,” Mačiulis said.
Mačiulis said future satellite constellations “will inevitably rely on optical links, because that gives information superiority and security and resistance to jamming electronic warfare. There’s also sovereignty aspects, which means that there will never be a single player – there cannot be just Starlink.”
