This week we are all excited to witness the launch of Artemis II, the first crewed flight around the moon since 1972!
When most people think about NASA’s Artemis missions, they picture rockets, astronauts, lunar flybys, and the return of human exploration beyond low Earth orbit. But another part of the story is just as important: communications. Artemis II is expected to carry the Orion Artemis II Optical Communications System (O2O), a laser communications payload designed to transmit real science and crew data over optical links. NASA says demonstrations such as Deep Space Optical Communications have shown that laser systems can send more than 100 times more data than comparable radio networks, opening the door to higher-bandwidth communications for future missions to the Moon and beyond1,2,3. With O2O, Artemis is helping open the door to a new era of lunar communications — one where live video, high-resolution images, and faster data sharing become much more achievable for crewed missions beyond Earth orbit.
Why Photonic Hardware Precision Is a Mission-Critical Engineering Challenge
That kind of performance sounds futuristic, but the engineering challenge behind it is deeply practical. Optical communications depend on photonic hardware that can generate, guide, modulate, and detect light with extraordinary precision. In space, that hardware must also survive vibration, thermal cycling, radiation exposure, and long mission timelines. All of this means that if the photonic device is not built correctly at the micro- and nanoscale, the system-level performance suffers.
How Nanoscale Fabrication Defects Degrade Optical Performance
This is where materials characterization becomes part of the Artemis story. In integrated photonics and optical components, fabrication details such as waveguide sidewall roughness, discontinuities, and dimensional errors can cause signal degradation4,5,6.
Why SEM and FIB Are Essential Tools for Photonic Device Characterization
This is where scanning electron microscopes and focused ion beams become critical. For photonic devices, it is not enough to know that optical performance missed the target. Engineers need to know why. Was the etched sidewall rougher than expected? Was the waveguide profile tapered or bowed? Were the layer thicknesses out of spec? Is there buried contamination at an interface? Did the fabrication process leave behind voids, microcracks, or subtle geometry changes that are invisible in top-down inspection? These are exactly the kinds of questions that materials characterization at Covalent can answer.
Figure 1. Cross section of an InP-on-Si DFB laser diode.
Note. Adapted from Shahin et al. (2018).
Cross-Sectioning with FIB: Seeing Inside Photonic Structures
Cross sectioning with a focused ion beam allows engineers to cut precisely into a photonic structure and inspect the true buried geometry of waveguides, couplers, multilayer stacks, and interfaces. That can reveal whether the fabricated structure matches design intent, and whether nanoscale roughness or process-induced damage may be contributing to poor optical behavior.
The Broader Lesson: Better Communications Requires Better Metrology
The broader lesson is that space communications are not just about antennas, lasers, or data rates. They are also about the quality of the materials and structures inside the hardware. NASA’s push toward optical communications highlights a larger trend that reaches far beyond aerospace: as devices rely more heavily on photonics, the manufacturing tolerances become tighter and the role of characterization becomes more critical. In other words, the path to better communications often runs straight through better metrology.
For companies working in photonic devices, the Artemis example is a useful reminder that performance is rarely just a design problem. It is also a fabrication and materials characterization problem. Whether the application is deep-space communications, datacenter optics, sensing, or quantum photonics, small structural imperfections can create large functional consequences. The exciting headline may be “laser links to the Moon,” but behind that headline is a quieter reality: reliable photonic performance depends on understanding materials, interfaces, and geometry at the smallest scales.
References
- NASA. (2026, January 28). Networks keeping NASA’s Artemis II mission connected.
- NASA. Deep Space Optical Communications (DSOC).
- NASA. (2024, August 1). Deep space optical communications will provide 10X to 100X increased data returns over present radio frequency space communications.
- Khurana, M., et al. (2025). Wafer-scale waveguide sidewall roughness scattering loss evaluation based on high-resolution SEM imaging.
- Bhatt, G. R., et al. (2024). Influence of discontinuities on photonic waveguides.
- Azough, E., et al. (2025). Effect of waveguide wall roughness on quantum signal performance.
- Shahin, M. M., Ma, K., Abbasi, A., Roelkens, G., & Morthier, G. (2018). 45 Gbps direct modulation of two-section InP-on-Si DFB laser diodes. IEEE Photonics Technology Letters. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1109/LPT.2018.2811906