TeraLink-1

TeraLink-1 will fly the first-ever terahertz-frequency space-to-ground link demo. It’s a 6U CubeSat funded by AFRL’s University Nanosatellite Program and built with the Ultrabroadband Nanonetworking Lab (UNLab) at Northeastern’s Institute for Intelligent Network Systems, and its payload is a pair of THz-band antennas for 225 GHz uplink and downlink.

The mission’s goal is the world’s first sub-terahertz access link in low Earth orbit: high-throughput uplink and downlink between 220 and 225 GHz, a band that has never been operated in space. The payload is a custom, compact 3-4U sub-THz transceiver with up to 200 mW of transmit power. It will detect, characterize, and statistically analyze the sub-THz channel in both directions against a ground station at Northeastern. Sponsors include AFRL, NASA JPL, NASA’s CubeSat Launch Initiative, and the NSF.

After deploying into an ISS orbit and detumbling, TeraLink-1 keeps its solar panels pointed at the sun. On passes over campus it relays telemetry and location over UHF while its THz antenna face tracks our THz ground station. The experiment data is too big for UHF, so it comes down over S-band through three Amazon Web Services ground stations.

The satellite design is complete. After making it through the first round last year, the team is preparing for UNP’s Critical Design Review in November (eight hours of AFRL judges critiquing our system design and analyses), and building a FlatSat for flight-software development (F´ and embedded) and hardware- and software-in-the-loop testing. So far the program has passed the SCR, SRR, PMR, and PDR mission reviews, more than 20 hours of technical presentations to government sponsors and expert panelists. CDR will finalize the hardware and systems design for both the satellite bus and the ground station.