Once in a while we get asked to deliver fibre connectivity to some pretty remote locations but todays episode is really taking it to the limit.

Welcome to Building Fibre where we take an inquisitive look at how creating a smart, connected worlds, is impacting the way we design optical communications infrastructure.

This week the Space-Comm conference takes place at the Farnborough International Exhibition & Conference Centre in Hampshire, UK. For those of you who don’t know, Farnborough has been the main aeronautical and aerospace centre in the UK for many years.

Coincidentally I received and document on the latest project to investigate somewhere a little further afield than normal – in fact 600 Million Km further afield , a project called the Jupiter Icy Moon Explorer mission or JUICE for short, and JUICE will study both Jupiter and its three large ocean-bearing moons. Now according to the Internet, Jupiter has 53 named moons and another 26 awaiting official names, that’s 79 moons. So that piqued my interest a little bit, I had to know more…

JUICE is a European Space Agency mission, and is designed to spend at least three years collecting data at Jupiter, and will observe three of the planet’s icy moons: Ganymede, Callisto, and Europa.

By studying Jupiter and its moons, JUICE will help astrobiologists understand how habitable worlds might emerge around these gas giant planets. The icy moons of Jupiter are also primary targets for astrobiology research in the Solar System. Moons like Europa are believed to harbour oceans of liquid water beneath their icy surfaces, and it is possible that these oceans could be habitable for life as we know it.

As the largest planet in our solar system, Jupiter is the fifth planet from the Sun, with the Earth being the third and somewhere in between us is Mars. Because both Earth and Jupiter travel in an elliptical path around the sun, the distance between them is constantly changing. When the two planets are at their closest point, the distance to Jupiter is a mere 365 million miles (588 million Km).

Jupiter has the shortest day of all the planets and rotates on its axis once every nine hours and 55 minutes which means your working hours are short but you don’t get much sleep or leisure time.

It has a very strong magnetic field, around 14 times that found on earth and, not surprisingly, it’s also the largest magnetic field on any planet in the solar system.

JUICE is tasked with finding out more about the magnetic aspect by using an onboard magnetometer, named the J-MAG instrument, which is going to perform planetary sized magnetic field measurements. The magnetometer uses a laser light source and it has an optical sensor located at the tip of a 10.5 m long boom which will be deployed soon after the satellite has been launched. Hence the need for a bit of fibre optic connectivity.

Let’s get some perspective here. Space is a tough environment. It can be both cold and hot and there’s radiation, which is generally considered to be really bad stuff.

As I browse through the paper I’m reading it outlins some of the design challenges that they face, I have to confess, the expected operating conditions in space makes the toughest Earth based fibre deployment look like a gentle walk in the park.

The specification for, what on Earth would be called a patch cord, reads somewhat different when it’s going to fit inside an inter-planetary satellite. Here’s a summary of the scientific bits concerning that particular instrument that will be measuring magnetic fields, the JUICE Magnetometer or J-MAG:

The onboard J-MAG instrument uses a light source in the form of a 795 nm Vertical-Cavity Surface Emitting Laser or VCSEL and a photodetector both of which are located within the satellite body.