Sony’s New Satellite Company Will Have Space Lasers

Sony has created a new company that will manufacture and supply devices that allow small satellites in orbit to communicate with each other using lasers.

Sony Space Communications, created on Wednesday (1), will take advantage of laser technology to avoid bottlenecks in radio frequencies. The devices will work between satellites and their communication with stations on the ground.

The company did not say when it expects to have the first commercial device operating in space, whether there are already customers waiting or the size of the investment in the technology so far.

There are nearly 12,000 satellites in Earth orbit, a number that is expected to grow in the coming years as space rocket companies are able to reduce the cost of launches into space and as companies like Amazon and SpaceX are assembling vast networks of orbiting satellites. low for offering internet services around the globe.

“The amount of data used in orbit is increasing every year, but the radio frequencies available are limited,” said the new company’s president, Kyohei Iwamoto, in a statement.

SpaceX already produces its own laser communication devices and launched the first for its Starlink satellite network late last year.

Sony said one of its first successful tests with the technology took place in 2020, when the company transmitted high-definition image data by laser from the International Space Station to a ground-based facility in Japan.