The isolation and stabilization technology developed through this research is targeted for insertion into NASA's deep space planetary missions demonstrating long range optical communications. The capability is considered a "Push Technology" enabling new missions or enhancing missions already planned for the Integrated Radio and Optical Communications (iROC) program, the Space Communications and Navigation (SCaN) program, and the Deep Space Optical Terminal (DOT) project. By providing component-level isolation and stabilization at the optical payload, this approach does not impose any unusual constraints on the host vehicle. This makes the technology broadly applicable to a wide range of vehicles including sRLVs, orbital RLVs, Earth orbiting satellites (even the simplest thruster-only designs), and deep space vehicles. The technology is targeted for high data throughput applications requiring optical links, but the core approach is applicable any space payload requiring high-performance isolation and stabilization. Applications include commercial and military communications satellites, next-generation large space telescopes, space-based interferometric telescopes, advanced geo-pointing surveillance and reconnaissance payloads, etc. NASA and the U.S. comprise less than half of the overall total satellite market, so there are significant international applications for the technology.
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