Correcting for Atmospheric Effects in Optical Communication

A method of correcting for the distorting effects of the atmosphere upon a laser beam used in free-space optical communication has been proposed. The original version of the method would be applied to a system in which a laser beam would be transmitted from a ground station to a precisely flat and precisely oriented mirror on a spacecraft in orbit around the Earth, then relayed to a distant spacecraft by reflection from the mirror (see figure). Because propagation of the beam in outer space would be distortionless, the method addresses only the distortions that would arise along the ground-station/near-Earth-spacecraft path.