If the opticalhead is ontrack, then the primarybeamwill be centered on a track (with pits and bumps) and the twosecondarybeams will be centered on land.
Wave Gliders collect enormous amounts of data and crunch the numbers distilling 4 gigabytes of raw data to a kilobyte of relevant information a client wants, for instance and then activate their Iridium satellite link to beam the result to servers on land.
Unlike previous one-way demonstrations, the LCDD uses an infrared beam -- in the same way that many land-based fiber networks do -- that can be received on Earth by one of three telescopes located in Mexico, California or Spain.