Blue Devil Airship is Getting a Super-High-Speed Optical Laser Downlink Upgrade

[winchesterdelta1]

Would be nice to use these things for online gaming. A huge project reality server with allot of bandwith

The Air Force?s Blue Devil airship--a recent PopSci Best of What?s New recipient and a potential answer to the military?s expanding data glut problem--is getting yet another high-tech upgrade. Via a federal announcement put out last week, The Register reports that DARPA will outfit the Blue Devil Block 2 ISR airship with up to two Free-space Optical Experimental Network Experiment (FOENEX) systems. Think of them like optical lasers that move through the air with the fidelity of a fiber optic cable.

FOENEX taps adaptive optics technology--the same technology that lets terrestrial telescopes filter out visual noise from Earth?s atmosphere--to correct for distortions in the light caused by things like moisture and particulate matter in the air. They do so by measuring the distortions in a guide laser, then adjusting the receiver to compensate--down to one fifty-thousandth of a millimeter every millisecond. This basically gets rid of all airborne noise that can alter the stream of incoming photons in any way.

Source: Blue Devil Airship is Getting a Super-High-Speed Optical Laser Downlink Upgrade | Popular Science