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Optical aperture
150 mm
Starlens Arctic-4 · Optical Ground Station
Catch
the light.
Satellites gather far more data than radio can ever bring down. Starlens catches it — as a beam of laser light — and pours it into the network at the speed of fibre.
Follow the beam
Plain and simple
So… what is an
optical ground station?
Picture the fibre-optic cable buried under your street — data racing along it as tiny pulses of light. An optical ground station is that same idea, only pointed at the sky.
A satellite passing overhead fires a laser straight down to Starlens. A telescope catches the beam, turns the light back into data, and feeds it to the ground. No field of dishes, no crowded radio channel — just a clean line of light between orbit and Earth.
The hard part is aiming: the satellite is smaller than a fridge, moving at 7 km a second, hundreds of kilometres up. Starlens finds it, locks on, and holds the beam steady the whole way across the sky.
Why light, not radio
One pass. Orders of magnitude more data.
Radio is a narrow, licensed, crowded pipe. A laser link is measured in gigabits, not megabits — so a single overhead pass can bring down far more of what a satellite collected.
Radio downlink0.0 Gb / pass
Optical downlink0 Gb / pass
10–100× the throughput
1550 nm telecom band
Pencil-thin beam · hard to intercept
No spectrum licence
Illustrative per-pass figures. Optical downlink rates depend on satellite, geometry, and weather.
How a downlink happens
Orbit to ground in three moves.
01 — Acquire
It races overhead
A low-orbit satellite crosses the sky at ~7 km/s, its recorders full of imagery, weather, and traffic it needs to offload.
02 — Lock & downlink
The beam locks on
Starlens' turret slews to meet it, the two find each other, and the satellite beams its data down as a laser pulse-train.
03 — Deliver
Light becomes data
The telescope catches the beam, converts photons back into bits, and pushes them straight into the fibre network on the ground.
The machine · Arctic-4
Meet Arctic‑4.
A complete optical ground station that folds into a case and stands up on the ice in thirty minutes.
The eye
A 150 mm optical aperture collects the downlink beam; a fine-tracking sensor keeps it perfectly centred.
Tracking turret
Slews across the whole sky to follow a satellite from horizon to horizon.
Azimuth drive
A precision ring rotates the head smoothly without ever losing lock.
Ice legs
Four spiked, self-levelling legs bite into ice, rock, or gravel — no foundation, no crane.
The eye
150 mm optical aperture collects the downlink beam; a fine-tracking sensor keeps it centred.
Tracking turret
Slews across the whole sky to follow a satellite from horizon to horizon.
Azimuth drive
Precision ring rotates the head smoothly without losing lock.
Ice legs
Four spiked, self-levelling legs bite into ice, rock, or gravel — no foundation.
Why the far North
Built for Canada's North.
Satellites in polar orbit cross the high Arctic on nearly every lap — so a station up here sees more passes than almost anywhere on Earth. It's the best seat in the world for catching data from space.
But the North has little fibre and unforgiving weather. Arctic‑4 is built to be dropped in by a two-person crew, run at −50 °C, and connect the top of the world.
Arctic-4 at a glance
The numbers it's designed to hit.
Downlink rate
up to 100 Gbps*
Wavelength
1550 nm
Acquisition
< 60 seconds to lock
Deploy time
30 min · 2 crew
Operating range
−50 → +45 °C
*Target figures for Arctic-4. Specifications are provisional and subject to change.
Coming soon.
Be first to see Arctic-4 open to the sky.