Artemis II successful demonstration

Published in the RSAA Lunations
Vol1 Issue71 1–30 April 2026

The laser communication team successfully demonstrated high-speed optical communications with the Quantum Optical Ground Station. We were fortunate to have reasonably good weather, resulting in around 15.5 hours of laser time, and downlinking 43Gb of data for the mission. Views of external and internal cameras were live streamed to different platforms including YouTube while we were linked. Unfortunately for Australia this was usually around 2 to 6 am, which would be prime time in the US and Europe but I doubt many here were able to see the improved quality of video from our work.

This demonstration was the result of an enormous amount of work from the team, and a lot of support from local leadership, ANU, InSpace, and NASA. We were able to fill our knowledge gaps with experts from the NASA Glenn Research Centre and Goddard Space Flight Centre, with several of them travelling out here several times to help us assemble, test, and operate our system. 

It isn't often that we get to celebrate such a project success like this. Having been working towards this goal for 6 years now it is difficult to fully appreciate the milestones and steps along the way that lead to a successful outcome. Overall our system and team performed extremely well. A huge thanks to everyone who made this possible, including our local and ANU IT support for integrating a secure network connection back to NASA on short notice.

Francis Bennett

Image: Team in the MOC truck during operations: Francis Bennet, Michael Copeland, Elisa Jager, Kristoffer Olsen (NASA), Sarah Tedder (NASA), Ian Price, Doris Grosse, Peter Simon (NASA), Terra Hardwick (NASA)