zlacker

>>alden5+(OP)
> The lasers, which can sustain a 100Gbps connection per link

> Brashears also said Starlink’s laser system was able to connect two satellites over 5,400 kilometers (3,355 miles) apart. The link was so long “it cut down through the atmosphere, all the way down to 30 kilometers above the surface of the Earth,” he said, before the connection broke.

How do these tiny satellites achieve this kind of accuracy and link quality when they're shooting around Earth with 17.000 miles an hour?

(Meanwhile, me on Earth, has link quality issues due to a speck of dust on a fiber connector)

>>mschus+Z55
This says more about the link budget than anything else, it's much harder to keep tracking when satellites are close to each other moving at high relative velocities. At the distances in your example, movement of the laser link optical head is very slow, on the order of 0.01 - 0.1 deg/s. Optical heads also have a control loop which actively corrects for pointing errors once a positive link is established. Check out: https://www.sda.mil/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/SDA-OCT-Stand...