January 28, 2013 NASA Beams Mona Lisa to Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter at the Moon01/28/2013 Laser communication and ranging experiments were successfully conducted from the satellite laser ranging (SLR) station at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) to the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) in lunar orbit. The experiments used 4096-ary pulse position modulation (PPM) for the laser pulses during one-way LRO Laser Ranging (LR) operations. Reed-Solomon forward error correction codes were used to correct the PPM symbol errors due to atmosphere turbulence and pointing jitter. The signal fading was measured and the results were compared to the model. The Mona Lisa Lasercom to the Moon from NGSLR demonstrates the potential of the SG Network beyond geodesy. The NASA news release was picked up by nearly all the major news outlets. Several members of the NGSLR team were co-authors of the paper which was published online in Optics Express. Read the paper in Optics Express.
