Intersatellite optical communication links will be crucial for the development of future global optical and quantum communication networks. Under the harsh space environment satellite optical terminals will suffer pointing jitter and wavefront errors. In this paper, the impact of the combination of these errors on the transmitter side is modeled. Combining the far-field diffraction patterns obtained through computational Fourier optics and the statistics of the pointing jitter, the received power statistics are derived numerically for different scenarios. The computational model is first used to evaluate the optimum nominal parameters of the transmitted beam. Then, several optical aberrations are added to the transmitted beam and their impact on the communication performance is evaluated through the average bit error rate.
Growing interest in free-space optical communication, due to the high bandwidth and security provided by these links, has generated the necessity of designing high-performance satellite terminals. In order to develop these terminals, the opto-thermo-mechanical phenomena that appear in the space environment and their effect on optical communication links have to be understood in detail. A review of the opto-thermo-mechanical phenomena occurring in spaceborne terminals is presented, describing the relevance of each of them. The methods found to compute the impact on the communication performance due to opto-thermo-mechanical phenomena are collected by building the bridge between the optical and communication performance parameters. Finally, techniques available to mitigate the detrimental effects of these phenomena are classified, and the relevant research challenges are identified.
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