World’s First Portable Satellite Station for Sending & Receiving Secure Quantum Communications Is Up and Running in China

(SatelliteToday) The world’s first portable ground station for sending and receiving secure quantum communications is up and running. The station has successfully connected to China’s Quantum Science Satellite, nicknamed Mozi, which was launched in August 2016.
Ji-Gang Ren at the University of Science and Technology of China in Hefei and his colleagues used the mobile station to send a secure data transmission from Jinan in north-east China.
Building a mobile quantum ground station was motivated by demand from users, such as the state-owned Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC), for equipment that didn’t require purpose-built infrastructure, says Ren.
ICBC and the People’s Bank of China are already using satellite-based quantum key distribution between distant cities, such as Beijing in north-east China and Urumqi in the far north-west