2025/12/12 by Nair, Anish, Connell, Austin O', Arulpragasam, Shalomi +1
Engineering · #FOS: Electrical engineering #Optical Wireless Communication Technologies #Signal Processing (eess.SP) #Space Satellite Systems and Control #Spacecraft Design and Technology #electronic engineering #information engineering
paper · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2512.11629
openalex publication_date 2025/12/12 · openalex created_date 2025/12/16 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
This work investigates the feasibility and design trade-offs for a companion spacecraft, or PaddleSat, to charge a host spacecraft by wirelessly transmitting power using a directional laser system. The primary goal of the PaddleSat is to supplement power on a host spacecraft to reduce the requirements for onboard power systems of the host spacecraft or extend mission lifetimes. System performance estimates, link budget calculations, optical transmission hardware and link analysis, design tradeoffs between beam divergence, optical efficiency, and relative orbital control requirements are examined.