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Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland 20771

ENGINEERING COLLOQUIUM

photo of Don Boroson

Monday, May 20, 2013 / 3:30 PM, Building 3 Auditorium

Don Boroson

"The Lunar Laser Communication Demonstration (LLCD)"

ABSTRACT -- Until now, spacecraft have used radio almost exclusively to communicate with the ground. Optical communications, using lasers, could increase efficiencies and data rates, while reducing the size and mass of the equipment. The Lunar Laser Communication Demonstration (LLCD) is a step toward making that possible. LLCD will ride on the Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE), scheduled to be launched to lunar orbit in September 2013. This talk will review the history of optical communication in space, introduce laser communication technology, and describe the LLCD mission.

SPEAKER -- Don Boroson is widely known in the lasercom community as a leader in advanced lasercom systems and technologies. He has been a member of the Communication Systems Division at MIT Lincoln Laboratory since he joined the Laboratory in 1977 after receiving his undergraduate and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from Princeton University. In non-optical technologies, Dr Boroson has worked in a diverse set of areas in communications including signal processor and receiver architecture design, modulation and coding design, large system integration and test, and space-ground network design. In optical comm, Dr. Boroson has led projects designing, modeling, building, and comprehensively testing high data rate laser communications systems for space applications. He was the Lead Engineer for the GeoLITE mission, the world's first successful demonstration of high-rate, space-based lasercom. Subsequent to that, Dr. Boroson was selected to be the Lead System Engineer on NASA's Mars Laser Communications Demonstration (MLCD), a joint project with Lincoln, JPL, and NASA, which was to have been the first demonstration of interplanetary laser communications. At present, he is the Principal Investigator and Lincoln Program Manager for the NASA Lunar Laser Communication Demonstration Project, which will be the first laser communications system to operate at lunar distances.

Don is the author of many journal and conference papers, including recent lasercom talks at SPIE, OFC, OSA, SMC-IT, MILCOM, ICSOS, and CLEO, and he is a Fellow of SPIE. He is also the owner of several patents in optical communications technologies. This year, Don was honored by being appointed to be a Laboratory Fellow at the MIT Lincoln Laboratory.




Engineering Colloquium home page: https://ecolloq.gsfc.nasa.gov