Europe's space laser communications system will launch this week

A "space data highway" that links satellites using high-speed laser transmissions should take a big step forward this week with the launch of the Eutelsat 9B satellite. The satellite's main role will be downlinking hundreds of TV channels to viewers in Europe, but it will also carry the first node in the European Space Agency's European Data Relay System (EDRS).

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The Laser Focus World take:

Intensive work has been devoted to protecting the secrecy of free-space communications via the application of cryptography. The discovery of quantum entanglement via the polarization of quanta enabled the marriage between single-photon optical communications and cryptography in the field now known as quantum cryptography. Free-space communications using quantum entanglement is not used in the EDRS, but may not be that far in the future, as explored in an article from our April 2015 issue by F. J. Duarte, a research physicist at Interferometric Optics, Rochester, NY, and Travis Taylor, a senior scientist at the US Army Space and Missile Defense Command, Huntsville, AL.

Related:Quantum entanglement physics secures space-to-space interferometric communications