Boston Chapter of the IEEE Photonics Society

Abstract:  In the next few years, NASA will launch the Artemis missions with the near term goal of bringing a crew of astronauts back to the moon, first on a flyby mission, and then with a subsequent mission targeting boots on the ground. The Artemis missions will leverage NASA's new space launch system (SLS) rocket and Orion crew capsule. NASA's Orion capsule will employ free-space optical communications over 400,000-km from the lunar vicinity to Earth, using an 80-Mb/s downlink and a 20-Mb/s uplink. This free-space optical link will be able to support real-time streaming 4K video between the astronauts and the Earth over lunar distances. This talk will provide an overview of the optical link and will focus on the modem module development for the Orion capsule.

Biography:  David J. Geisler received the B.S. degree in electrical engineering from Tufts University, Medford, MA, USA, in 2004, the M.S. degree in electrical engineering from the University of California, Davis, CA, USA, in 2009, and the Ph.D. degree in electrical and computer engineering from the University of California, Davis, in 2012. After starting at Lincoln Laboratory in 2012, David joined the Advanced Lasercom and Systems Group at MIT Lincoln Laboratory and worked on free-space optical communications systems for a variety of missions. In particular, he has done significant work on coherent architectures for free-space optical communications. David also led the effort to procure a first of its kind modem module from industry in support of the NASA Orion program. He is currently an Assistant Group Leader in the Laser Technology and Applications Group at MIT Lincoln Laboratory. His current project portfolio includes laser development for communications, LIDAR, and sensing applications at a variety of wavelengths.

David is an author or co-author on over 70 conference and journal papers. From 2015 - 2019, David served as subcommittee member and then chair of the Lightwave Communications and Optical Networks subcommittee at CLEO. Since 2019, he has been a committee member of the Photonic Networks and Devices (NETWORKS) conference, which is part of the OSA Advanced Photonics Congress (APC). David is a senior member of both the OSA and the IEEE.

Location:  Online Seminar