Status of Tesat laser communication activities

With the EDRS program, the European Data Relay System, a private public partnership program between the European Space Agency ESA and Airbus Defence and Space ADS, laser communication has entered the commercial service since November 2016 [1]. Currently four Earth Observation satellites named Sentinels equipped with TESAT Laser Communication Terminals from the Copernicus program of the European Union are served by 40 data relay links per day, already accumulating to more than 31000 links in total. We report on the performance of the systems in space and detail on other activities of Tesat.