NASA’s TBIRD System Achieves Record-Breaking Data Transfer Speeds from Space to Earth

SPACE — The American Space Agency (NASA) uses the TeraByte InfraRed Delivery (TBIRD) system to communicate between space and laboratories on Earth. With this technology, NASA has achieved a data transfer rate of 200 (gigabits per second) Gbps from outer space.

This technology is far more reliable than fiber optic technology. On Earth, optical fiber is the fastest and most reliable medium of internet connectivity. However, this connectivity gives consumers data transfer speeds of up to 2 Gbps (gigabits per second).

The TBIRD is about the size of a regular tissue box and housed inside NASA’s Pathfinder Technology Demonstrator (PTD) 3 CubeSat. The system was launched into space on May 25, 2022.

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The PTD-3 uses a reaction wheel to ensure the TBIRD is correctly oriented to transmit data to ground stations at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California.

The ground station also uses an internally developed protocol to tell TBIRD which data is correctly received so that the satellite can only resend frames that were not received. This can save time and energy.

Reported from SlashGearTBIRD was conceptualized by scientists at MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory in 2014. Its goal is to achieve low-cost, high-speed transmission of large amounts of data from spacecraft.

The problem has always been that modern spacecraft rely on radio waves to communicate and transmit data. The volume of data generated is too large to be sent back to Earth.

To give you an idea, the James Webb Space Telescope can generate up to 57GB of data every day. However, with the technology that existed at that time it could only transmit up to 28Mbps.

This means a day’s worth of data will take more than four and a half hours of continuous transmission. Therefore, laboratories began to implement laser communication technology, which makes it possible to transmit 100 to 1000 times the speed of radio transmissions currently implemented.

In addition to significantly increasing transmission speeds, the TBIRD program has also started building satellites with commercially ready components. TBIRD is designed without gimbals to reduce overall weight.

On April 28, 2023, TBIRD achieved a data transfer rate record of 200 Gigabits per second. This is the highest space transmission speed ever achieved with optical communication technology. With this test, NASA can double the previous data transmission speed record of 100Gbps, which was set in June 2022.

By making two 5-minute passes to the receiving station each day, TBIRD can transmit several terabytes of data with each pass. For example, in December 2022, TBIRD transmits 1.4TB of data in one go. This record did not last long, broken a few months later.

TBIRD transmitted its largest amount of data on May 16, 2023, when it managed to transmit 4.8 terabytes of data without error in a single pass past a receiving station in the Test Laboratory at NASA JPL.