MOSCOW (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 23rd May, 2020) Russian cosmonauts on board the International Space Station (ISS) have tested a domestic broadband system to communicate with Earth without using US relay satellites, cosmonaut Alexander Skvortsov said.
Skvortsov returned to Earth in February aboard the Soyuz MS-13 spacecraft together with Italian astronaut Luca Parmitano and NASA astronaut Christina Koch.
"The Russian segment of the ISS now has its own broadband communication system. And I had a chance to try it out: the picture is amazing, like good digital tv, and voice latency is very low," Skvortsov said, as quoted on the Russian State Space Corporation Roscosmos website.
Thus, the cosmonaut went on, we are getting "our own data transmission channel, i.e. ability to transmit large packets of telemetry information independently from our American colleagues."
Currently, to transmit large amounts of information from the station to Earth and back, the Russian segment is mainly using US tracking and data relay satellites, TDRS, on a fee basis.
In November, Oleg Khimochko, the first deputy general director of Russian satellite operator Gonets, told Sputnik that equipment to provide a broadband communication channel between the Russian segment of the ISS and Earth via Luch-5 relay satellites had been delivered. He added that the channel would start operating in full in 2020, with the speed up to 105 megabits per second.
As of now, the Luch relay satellite constellation includes three spacecraft - Luch-5A, Luch-5B and Luch-5V - which were launched into space from 2011-2014. In 2024, Russia plans to launch the Luch-5VM satellite.
