NASA reaches laser communication at a distance of 226 kilometers

NASA was able to establish optical communication using a laser during the Psyche mission. at an unprecedented distance of 226 million kilometersone and a half times the distance between the Earth and the Sun.

He Deep space optical communications experiment interacted for the first time with the communications system of the Psyche spacecraft, transmitting engineering data to Earth.

Although a spacecraft heading to multiple asteroids does not use optical communications to transmit data, new technology has proven its effectiveness. After interacting with Psyche’s radio frequency transmitter, the laser communications demonstration sent a copy of the engineering data from over 226 million kilometers away, one and a half times the distance between the Earth and the Sun.

This achievement provides insight into how Spacecraft could use optical communications in the future

enabling faster transmission of complex scientific information, as well as high-definition images and video in support of humanity’s next great leap: sending humans to Mars.

“During the April 8 flyby, we disabled approximately 10 minutes of duplicate data from the spacecraft,” Meera Srinivasan, project manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, said in a statement. “Up to this point, we have been sending test and diagnostic data through our downlinks to Psyche. This represents an important milestone for the project as it shows how optical communications can interact with the spacecraft’s radio frequency communications system“.

Laser communication technology in this demo designed to transmit data from deep space at speeds 10 to 100 times faster than the next generation radio frequency systems used on deep space missions today.

After launch on October 13, 2023, the spacecraft remains in good condition during the journey to the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter to visit the asteroid Psyche.

NASA’s optical communications demonstration showed it could transmit test data at a maximum speed of 267 megabits per second (Mbps) from the near-infrared laser downlink of the flight laser transceiver, the data transfer speed is comparable to the download speed of broadband Internet.

What reached December 11, 2023, when the experiment transmitted a 15-second ultra-high-definition video to Earth from a distance of 31 million kilometers, about 80 times the Earth-Moon distance. The video, along with other test data including digital versions of Arizona State University’s Psyche Inspired illustrations, was loaded into the flight laser transceiver ahead of Psyche’s launch last year.

Now that the spacecraft is more than seven times further away, the speed reduced ability to send and receive data, as expected. During testing on April 8, the spacecraft transmitted test data at a maximum speed of 25 Mbps, far exceeding the project’s goal of demonstrating the ability to achieve speeds of at least 1 Mbps at that distance.

The project team also ordered the transceiver to optically transmit the data generated by Psyche.. While Psyche transmitted data over its radio frequency link to NASA’s Deep Space Network (DSN), the optical communications system simultaneously transmitted some of the same data to the Hale Telescope at Caltech’s Palomar Observatory in San Diego, California, the main technology demonstration center. downlink ground station.

During this experiment, test data, as well as digital photographs of pets, were transmitted to Psyche and vice versa. on a round trip journey of 450 million kilometers. He also downloaded a large amount of engineering data from a technical demo to study the performance of an optical link.