Link design of Moon-to-Earth optical communication based on telescope array receivers

Optical communication technology shows promising prospects to fulfill the large bandwidth requirements of future deep-space exploration. This paper mainly studies the link design of Moon-to-Earth optical communication based on the telescope array receiver. Firstly, we analyze and design the telescope array model. An array of relatively small-sized telescope combined to form a larger synthesized aperture is a viable and efficient alternative to a large monolithic telescope. Moreover, this array structure also saves the total costs of the telescopes. In addition, we present an end-to-end system analysis to provide the expected signal and background photons as a function of the Moon–Earth distance. Then, we describe the work on the link design of the Moon-to-Earth optical communication. This primarily includes the received power, the antenna gain, the space loss, the atmospheric loss, and so on. We also provide an approximation calculation to the channel capacity, the data rate, the bit error ratio (BER) and signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). This demonstrates much theoretical significance on the actual Moon-to-Earth optical communication.