Propagation statistics of ground-satellite optical links with different turbulence conditions

Abstract

The European Space Agency (ESA) geostationary data-relay satellite ARTEMIS started its operation in February 2003, after reaching its final position in the geostationary orbit. Since then, ESA and the Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias (IAC) have carried out routinely bidirectional optical link experiments between ARTEMIS and the Optical Ground Station (OGS), installed in the Teide Observatory of the IAC in the Canary Islands, Spain. The main purpose of such experimental campaigns is to characterise and model the optical links performance from the propagation and communication points of view, under different atmospheric turbulence conditions. The statistical results presented in this paper cover the uplink and downlink performance, including scintillation, fade and surge statistics, intensity distributions and spectral analysis. The effect of using different number of transmitted beams and different divergences is also considered. Additionally, the results are correlated with the atmospheric turbulence conditions, in terms of profiles of the index of refraction structure constant, isoplanatic angle, seeing and wind profiles, measured in most of the cases simultaneously with the laser communication experiments