Earth has received a laser transmission from deep space, according to the American space agency NASA. The transmission, which came from a record distance of 230 million kilometers, came from NASA's 2023 'Psyche' spacecraft.
NASA launched a space mission last October to send a spacecraft to the asteroid 'Psyche 16'.
'Psyche 16' is believed to be composed mainly of metal, a rarity in the solar system. It is said to be located in the asteroid belt between the planets Mars and Jupiter.
The spacecraft 'Psyche' is named after the asteroid it is trying to explore. The other mission this robot explorer is working on is testing laser communications between deep space and Earth.
Equipped with the Deep Space Optical Communications (DSOC) system, the 'Psyche' aims to enable laser communications over vast distances in space, promising much faster connections than current methods.
Although Psyche primarily uses radio frequency communications, optical communications technology proved successful in transmitting information and technical data directly from the spacecraft back to Earth.
“This represents a major milestone for the project by demonstrating how optical communications can interface with a spacecraft's radio frequency communications system,” Meera Srinivasan, the project's operations lead at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, said in a statement.
Srinivasan explained that NASA downlinked about 10 minutes of duplicate spacecraft data during an April 8 pass.
She said the duplicate data was sent via laser communications. In contrast, the original Psyche data was sent to ground control using standard radio frequency communications channels on NASA's Deep Space Network (DSN).
“The aim was to assess whether laser communications could perform as effectively, if not better, than traditional methods,” she added.
NASA's optical communications demonstration proved it can transmit test data at a maximum speed of 267 Mbps using the flight laser transceiver's near-infrared downlink laser, which is comparable to broadband Internet speeds.
However, because the spacecraft is now much further away, the data transfer rate is slower.
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Published: May 2, 2024 4:15 PM IST