European scientists receive data from space experiments at home broadband speeds thanks to the flawless operation of a mighty antenna installed on the International Space Station five years ago.
NASA astronaut Michael Hopkins is pictured installing the communications device – roughly the size of a cool box – outside ESA’s Columbus laboratory on 27 January 2021. Since then, the Columbus Ka-band antenna (ColKa) has supported research and operations from orbit through reliable, high-speed communications.
The system delivers a whole family’s worth of high data volume – up to 50 Mbit/s for downlink and up to 2 Mbit/s for uplink – for science and video streaming, including stunning time-lapses of Earth and Moon views captured by European astronauts.
Since the first data exchange on 8 April 2021, the antenna has operated continuously, switching off only during the arrival and departure of spacecraft to avoid interference.
Europe’s connection to our home in space follows a complex choreography. ColKa transmits signals that are picked up by the EDRS-A telecommunications satellite in geostationary orbit 36 000 km above Earth – some 90 times the altitude of the Space Station. This satellite is part of the European Data Relay System, our highway for high-speed data traffic in space.
The link enables internet-like connectivity with the Station, relaying data directly to European soil via the system’s ground station at Harwell in the UK. From there, scientific information travels to the Columbus Control Centre in Germany, and vice versa.
“The know-how gained from designing, building and running ColKa will be instrumental for ESA’s Lunar Link telecommunications antennas in the future lunar Gateway station – an outpost over 1000 times farther from Earth than the International Space Station, as well as for missions farther into deep space,” says Sara Pastor, ESA’s Gateway programme manager.
ColKa was designed and built by British and Italian companies, using subsystems from Canada, Belgium, France, Germany and Norway.