A team of engineers in Beijing has developed a small space laser that they say will allow satellites to travel long distances at much higher speeds than currently available similar technologies.

The technology is fast enough to send six high-definition movies from Seattle to New York in less than a second, according to work team leader Yang Jiang, an advanced communications technology and defense industry contractor at the Beijing Remote Sensing Equipment Institute.

In a paper published last week in the peer-reviewed journal Optical Communication Technology, Yang and colleagues said the device, which is smaller than a suitcase and weighs just 12 kg (26.4 pounds), will help China build a near-Earth Internet structure. . – Orbit and more.

The technology was originally developed for an unnamed space project and has a range of more than 4,000 km (2,485 miles) with an average speed of 10 gigabits per second.

By contrast, Japan’s JDRS-1 laser satellite, launched in 2020 to transmit data between spy satellites, can reach speeds of 1.8 gigabits per second, while the US military’s next-generation military architecture plans to create a global laser satellite network. Band width. 1 gigabit with a capacity of 250 megabits per second by 2028. Source