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The word on everyone’s lips at the moment seems to be AI – but for defence photonics in space, AI is a word that presents a series of significant development challenges ahead. Space is a domain which presents satellite mission designers with a harsh environment (bombarded with radiation and temperature swings, all while operating in a vacuum). It also presents data latency challenges stemming from the very physics of orbiting the Earth from a distance, and (unless they are in Geostationary orbit) continuously changing the point of the Earth they are passing over.

Space was declared a war fighting domain by NATO in 2019, due to the importance of the services and data it provides to the other defence domains. But as it has evolved in a largely civil world, the systems are in some cases quite archaic when compared to terrestrial ones, with limitations which now need to be addressed with substantial overhauls in the way space works, in order to meet both the defence and civil needs. Whether capturing images from- or passing communications via- space, the key to increasing the value of these things is the lowest latency possible and security all along the chain.

Latency is a particular challenge when you think about capturing images from space – where you need to:

These steps each have a minimum time associated with them, and for defence space especially, these time gaps can be quite substantial when you think about the time it takes for the satellites and ground stations to be aligned. In this day and age, struggling to be able to downlink data from satellites seems like a relic of the past – even before the days of dial up internet struggling to get a connection. But space communications have always traditionally been point-to-point, and even the CCSDS (Consultative Committee for Space Data Systems) standards which govern space communications have no networking layer in them. So, the next steps for space will be the beginnings of the information superhighway moving up on orbit – and with that the need for free space optical communications for inter-satellite links to facilitate the movement of data.

However, opening up the channels of communication also introduces security risks – so we will also be seeing space mission design focus around what is known as a zero-trust architecture. Whether encryption across every step of the chain from requesting an action (e.g. taking an image) to that action having been completed (e.g. image being delivered to the requestor) and the contents can be verified. For defence space photonics used for imagery the rise of AI alongside low latency needs and vastly increasing volumes of data generated by satellites on orbit will mean more automation of processing in the future. However, the nature of defence intelligence means that not only will there need to be zero trust architectures, but also verified image data entering into these processing loops. This will mean fundamental changes in the way we design imagers for space (and likely other defence domains) in the future. Thinking about how we can provide increasing trust in the images received in a growing sea of risks around deepfakes and altered data.

So, what does the future of photonics hold in the defence space domain? We expect a rise in the use of space using free space optical communications to follow the introduction of on-orbit mesh networking, and the result being much more rapid data receipt of assured image data. The future is fast and trustworthy hopefully!

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