Sony China officially announced that Sony America, a wholly-owned subsidiary, has established a new company, Sony Space Communications Corporation (SSC), which will be mainly engaged in the optical communication business in space.
At present, there are about 12,000 satellites in space, and the number is expected to increase in the future, according to Kumohei Iwamoto, president of Sony Space Communications. The amount of data used in orbit is also increasing year by year, but the amount of radio waves available is limited.
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Low-Earth Orbit (LEO) satellites need to communicate with the ground and therefore require extensive communications infrastructure to communicate in real-time, which is the problem because these satellites have to pass directly over ground stations to communicate with them.
In addition, the need for frequency licensing of radio waves and how to achieve low energy consumption for the communications equipment required by smaller satellites, such as microsatellites, are also pressing issues. To address these issues, SSC plans to develop small optical communication equipment to provide related services by connecting microsatellites in low-Earth orbit via laser beams.
Moreover, SSC plans to offer this optical communication equipment as a service to companies engaged in satellite development. By using optical communication, SSC is designed to enable high-speed communication between small devices, which is physically difficult to achieve with traditional radio communication, which requires large antennas and high power output.
Furthermore, by building an optical communication network not only between satellites and the ground but also between satellites in orbit, SSC aims to enable real-time communication from anywhere on the ground to any satellite in space. Optical communications are also easier to implement than traditional RF communications because they do not require domain-specific licenses like radio communications.
Sony said that the SSC aims to promote the wide application of cosmic optical communication and contribute to the improvement of people’s convenience in life by expanding social and economic activities, etc.
