Overview
- ESA reported an Airbus UltraAir terminal linking an aircraft to Alphasat TDP‑1 at about 36,000 km, sustaining an error‑free 2.6 Gbps connection for several minutes.
- China’s Academy of Sciences team established a two‑way 1 Gbps link to a high‑orbit satellite in roughly four seconds and kept it stable for more than three hours across over 40,000 km.
- The Chinese experiment used a 1.8‑meter ground aperture in Yunnan with high‑precision closed‑loop pointing for the uplink and high‑order adaptive optics plus mode‑diversity coherent reception for the downlink.
- Researchers say such links could enable real‑time tasking and turn high‑orbit satellites from relay stations into more intelligent processing nodes, though results remain experimental.
- Context from recent work shows LEO systems still lead in raw throughput, with China citing 120 Gbps links in January and SpaceX outlining terabit‑class Starlink capacities.