Late last year, NASA scientists launched a highly anticipated space mission. Essentially, they launched a spacecraft towards an asteroid that may have been made entirely of metal; It’s a rare combination – at least near our solar system. The robot adventurer’s name is Psyche, and her namesake is the giant rock that guides her journey: 16 Psyche.
However, Psyche also has a side quest: Laser communication.
On Psyche, among the asteroid survey equipment, there is a demonstration of technology called Deep Space Optical Communications. DSOC. DSOC aims to show that this is possible laser communication It will be transmitted across cosmic distances, providing a high-bandwidth, much faster connection between humans and the probes they send to the final frontier. To be more precise, communication speeds need to be 10 to 100 times faster than what we are currently working on. And strikingly, on April 8, DSOC appears to have reached some milestones.
Not only did it transmit data from Psyche’s then-position to Earth some 140 million miles (225 million kilometers) (a record distance greater than the space between our planet and the sun), but it also managed to beam the information back. collected directly from the spacecraft. This means that the DSOC transceiver actually interfaces with Psyche’s radio transmitter and sends back concrete engineering data from inside the vehicle.
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“We downlinked approximately 10 minutes of duplicate spacecraft data during a flyby on April 8,” said Meera Srinivasan, the project’s operations leader at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California. expression. What was downlinked was “copied” data because the “original” Psyche data was going to ground control, so to speak, via standard radio frequency communications channels on NASA’s Deep Space Network (DSN). The scientists just wanted to see if laser communication would work just as well, if not better.
Still, the success of this replicated data is a big deal in itself for the experiment; Although DSOC has made headlines recently with various milestones, a caveat has been issued. For example, in November last year The DSOC was not beaming back when it sent data back to Earth from 10 million miles (16 million km) away and during a recent “return test” in which scientists pinged the experiment with content and then had that content pinged back. any “real” information. It was preloaded test data that could be extracted on command.
“We were sending testing and diagnostic data to our contacts from Psyche,” Srinivasan said. “This represents a significant milestone for the project by demonstrating how optical communications can interface with a spacecraft’s radio frequency communications system.”
Now if you’re wondering how the speed tests for DSOC are going, we’ll have to move on to the cat video.
cat video
Recall that all previous DSOC data was testing information created by the team’s scientists. Scientists are only human after all.
In December last year, the DSOC hit several more checkpoints as it launched toward Psyche’s destination. First of all, it beamed data back from 19 million miles (31 million km) away (which doesn’t seem like much compared to today’s 140 million-mile journey, but it was huge back then). Second, the information it sent back traveled at 267 megabits per second (Mbps), the system’s maximum speed, and so it took something like 101 seconds to reach each Earth. NASA explains that this is equivalent to broadband internet download speed.
Third, some of the data was striking Taters’ video. Who is Taters, you ask? A sweet little orange Tabby cat, of course. (It would be an orange cat, right?) This is probably a good time to mention some of the latest “return test” data, which also includes pictures of pets.
However, during the April 8 test, DSOC did not maximize data transfer speeds as in Taters’ video. NASA’s statement states that the message arrived at DSOC’s primary downlink ground station at Caltech’s Palomar Observatory in San Diego County and was traveling at a maximum speed of 25 Mbps; However, it emphasizes how even this level exceeds the project’s target of at least 1 Mbps. this kind of distance.
One problem that arises for the team is that DSOC requires the cooperation of Mother Nature in order to work well. On the other hand, DSN communication is not very weather dependent. “Although storms occasionally disrupted operations at both Table Mountain and Palomar, we learned a lot about how far we could push the system when skies were clear,” said Ryan Rogalin, receiver electronics lead for the project at JPL. in the statement.
JPL’s Table Mountain Facility is here Location of DSOC’s Ground Laser TransmitterFascinatingly, NASA revealed that the laboratory recently attempted to combine this device with DSN’s optical antenna and Palomar’s equipment to see if the same signal could be coordinated simultaneously. The aim was to see if it was possible to switch between stations if an area was experiencing particularly bad weather conditions, forcing some instruments to shut down.
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It will be interesting to see how things shake out with deep space laser communications in the future, and DSOC seems to be pointing to an optimistic outcome. High-speed connectivity between space explorers and the rest of humanity on Earth will mean clearer cosmic images, a smoother transition for our species as engineers attempt to navigate Mars, and more advanced science overall.
As Ken Andrews, project flight operations leader at JPL, put it: “A small amount of data was downlinked over a short period of time, but the fact that we are doing this now has exceeded all our expectations.”
So, could laser communication at least lead us to taking cute alien pet photos one day?