The proposed solution will have a solid market in the digital broadcasting of TV and video as well. Satellite terminal manufacturer ViaSat Inc. has recently announced that its huge ViaSat-1 Ka-band broadband satellite is under budget and on schedule and that the market for Ka-band satellites worldwide is expanding for consumer, mobile and military use. Company Chief Executive Mark Dankberg said demand is rising so quickly that ViaSat would not rule out ordering a second all-Ka-band satellite even before ViaSat-1 is launched in 12 months. The Ka-band community ViaSat hopes to create with Eutelsat, Yahsat and others is also laying claim to mobile-broadband applications for commercial aircraft and maritime customers. It is estimated that over time, 10 to 20 percent of ViaSat-1's revenue is likely to be from military and commercial mobile-broadband customers
One prominent application of the proposed technology is NASA's Deep Space Network, aka DSN, which operates mostly in X-band and Ka-band. The huge antennas of the Deep Space Network are currently tracking different missions including two NASA Mars Exploration Rovers, Spirit and Opportunity. By 2020, the DSN will be required to support twice the number of missions it was supporting in 2005, because the new space probes contain scientific instruments that produce much more data than on earlier missions. The communication link with earth is already a bottleneck that limits the use of certain instruments and it seems that the demanded data rate of payloads will continue to increase. The proposed solution will be the most high-power solid-state Ka-band amplifier ever used for deep space communication, and will lead to future improvements in ground facilities and spacecraft hardware, providing a significant potential increase in data rate in deep space communication.
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