Every ounce counts when launching a rocket, which is why considerations for the Size, Weight, and Power (SWaP) of every component matters so much. For decades, one of the heaviest and most power-hungry components on a spacecraft has been its optical and communications hardware - specifically the bulky mechanical mirror used for LiDAR and free-space laser communications. But a new paper, published in Nature by researchers at MIT, MITRE, and Sandia National Laboratories, might have just fundamentally changed the SWaP considerations of LiDAR systems. Their technology, which they’re called a “photonic ski-jump” could one day revolutionize how spacecraft communicate.

At its core, the technology described in the paper is a photonics innovation. To get light off a computer chip and out into the world, engineers typically have to rely on a frustrating trade-off. They either use diffractive optics or micromechanical scanners - each has its own set of disadvantages. Diffractive optics are easy to scale, but they have poor beam quality. Micromechanical sensors, on the other hand, are physically huge and not easily scalable, especially on spacecraft.

The new “ski-jump” bypasses their weaknesses entirely. It is a nanoscale optical waveguide integrated directly onto a piezoelectrically controlled microcantilever - which makes it look like a series of miniaturized “ski jumps” taking off from the chip itself. It’s fabricated in a standard 200-mm CMOS foundry, and uses the thermal forces between the cooling of different layers of the chip, causing the cantilever to curve out at a 90 degree angle - straight up from the chip surface.