Building 12, N036
8800 Greenbelt Road
Greenbelt, Maryland 20771
The Lunar Lasercom Ground Terminal (LLGT), developed by MIT Lincoln Laboratories, consists of an array of transceiver and receiver telescopes and a control room. The telescope arrays are used to demonstrate a scalable and cost-effective approach for providing large-aperture transmitters and receivers.
Four 15-cm telescopes are used to send data to the space terminal and four 40-cm reflective telescopes are used to receive data from the space terminal. Each telescope is connected to the control room where the optical transmitters and receivers reside. All 8 telescopes are mounted on a single gimbal. The telescopes are housed in a fiberglass environmental enclosure, which maintains a suitable environment for their operation.
The control room houses all of the electronics to control the gimbal and telescopes as well as the ground terminal modem electronics and optics. Four optical transmitters generate the signals for the optical uplink. Each transmitter is connected to one of the transceiver telescopes.
The ground terminal is designed to be transportable. After initial assembly, the ground terminal will be deployed near MIT Lincoln Laboratory in Lexington, MA for calibration and performance characterization. Several months prior to launch of the LADEE spacecraft, the ground terminal will be transported to its operational location, currently planned for White Sands, NM.
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