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Speaking of "all things OSIRIS" I just ran across the OSIRIS optical communications system for cubesats and smallsats.

OSIRIS (Optical Space Infrared Downlink System) highly compact optical communication payloads for small spacecrafts in a LEO 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 is about ⅓U in size. I am not sure if it is meant for inter-satellite communications, or comms with Earth stations. Nor if it has been put in space and tested. Is this known?

If possible, any information on how this tiny system acquires and locks on to an Earth station with such a high differential velocity would be appreciated. Does it do it's own slewing, or rely on the cubesats ADCS to maintain its pointing? The PDF I've linked to seems to be early on in the development, so things may have changed.

enter image description here

above: CubeL (Credit: Tesat). From here.

BACKNANG, Germany 12.04.2018 Tesat PR) — Tesat’s Laser Communication Terminal for CubeSats, CubeL, is on track after recently the Critical Design Review (CDR) was successfully held at the German Aerospace Center (DLR) in Oberpfaffenhofen. This was an important milestone for the development program on the way to its demonstration mission, which is planned to launch later this year.

CubeL is a joint development program between the Optical Communication Systems (OCS) group of the DLR Institute of Communications and Navigation (IKN) and Tesat-Spacecom as the industrial partner. The successful work split of the product development between DLR IKN and Tesat is the key of this new space product.

“It is great to see how the teams are transferring scientific cutting-edge technology into a real commercial product line”, said Philipp Biller, Product Manager at Tesat-Spacecom.

With a size of only 1x1x0.3U (~10x10x3cm³) and a mass of about 350 gram the CubeL is the smallest laser communication terminal on the market. The data rate of 100Mbit/s will help to overcome the current bottleneck of today’s downlink technologies for CubeSats by a factor of 100 compared to common UHF links and enable new big data generating applications such as hyper spectral imaging.

“Introducing CubeL is a consequent expansion of Tesat’s unique laser communication product portfolio to offer both edges of the market. From high performance GEO to GEO inter-satellite terminals to ultra small low cost solutions for smaller satellite platforms”, said Matthias Motzigemba, Tesat’s Head of Sales Communication Systems.

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    $\begingroup$ CDR is a relatively early project milestone. There are no CuBeL in space yet. I'll ask Philipp :-) $\endgroup$
    – Jens
    Oct 20, 2018 at 11:52

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As of October 2018, the programme is in Qualification. Launch is scheduled for Q1/2019 with a Rocketlabs Electron on a Gomspace 3U platform.

Optical communication is for downlinks.

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  • $\begingroup$ That was fast, thanks! Is GOMX-3 the current "official" or at least working name of the mission or spacecraft itself? Or is it one of the names at the bottom of the slide shown in your link? i.stack.imgur.com/HHVXt.jpg text of which which might also answer the part of my question about pointing. $\endgroup$
    – uhoh
    Oct 22, 2018 at 8:32
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    $\begingroup$ @uhoh It's the name of a 3U satellite/spacecraft. See also directory.eoportal.org/web/eoportal/satellite-missions/g/gomx-3 $\endgroup$
    – Jens
    Oct 22, 2018 at 14:54
  • $\begingroup$ Feel free of course to roll back, I thought just having it all there in the answer would be more concise. Thanks for all of this info, I'll go through it in the morning. I think that this is really, really excellent (wish I had more fancy words!) $\endgroup$
    – uhoh
    Oct 22, 2018 at 17:41
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See https://eoportal.org/web/eoportal/satellite-missions/content/-/article/pixl-1 for more details on the mission

Launched beginning of 2021!

Launch: PIXL-1, a 3U CubeSat mission of DLR, was launched as one of many payloads (total of 143 satellites) on the Transporter-1 mission of SpaceX from the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station (SLC-40) in Florida on 24 January 2021 at 15:00 UTC.4

4A pi­o­neer­ing launch – com­pact satel­lite PIXL-1 car­ries the world's small­est laser ter­mi­nal into orbit

It is 2021-006AM, 47448 currently in a 527 x 543 km 97.5° polar orbit.

See also

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  • $\begingroup$ This is great, thank you for picking up on my question! I hope you don't mind that I've added a bit more information. $\endgroup$
    – uhoh
    Apr 8, 2021 at 15:06

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