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An innovative experiment flying aboard NASA’s Psyche mission has achieved its first major milestone by successfully achieving the furthest demonstration of laser communication. The tech demo could one day help NASA missions probe deeper into space and reveal more discoveries about the origins of the universe.
Launched in mid-October, Psyche is currently on its way to provide humanity’s first glimpse of a metal asteroid located between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. Over the next six years, the spacecraft will travel approximately 2.2 billion miles (3.6 billion kilometers) to reach its namesake destination, located on the outer reaches of the main asteroid belt.
Alongside the journey is the Deep Space Optical Communications technology demonstration, or DSOC, which operates its own mission for the first two years of the journey.
The tech demo is designed to be the U.S. space agency’s furthest experiment in high-bandwidth laser communications; is testing sending and receiving data to Earth using an invisible near-infrared laser. The laser can send data at 10 to 100 times the speed of traditional radio wave systems that NASA uses on other missions. If fully successful within the next few years, this experiment could be the future basis for technology used to communicate with humans exploring Mars.
And DSOC recently achieved what engineers call “first light”—the ability to successfully send and receive its first data.
In the experiment, for the first time, a laser encoded with data was beamed from far beyond the moon. Test data was sent from approximately 10 million miles (16 million kilometers) away and arrived at the Hale Telescope at the California Institute of Technology’s Palomar Observatory in Pasadena, California.
The distance between DSOC and Hale was approximately 40 times greater than the distance of the Moon from Earth.
“Reaching first light is one of many critical DSOC milestones that will occur in the coming months, paving the way for higher data-rate communications that can send scientific information, high-resolution images and video streams to send humans to humanity’s next giant leap forward. Trudy Kortes, director of technology demonstrations for NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate, made a statement.
Sending a laser into space
The first light, which occurred on November 14, occurred when the flight laser transceiver on Psyche received a laser beam sent from the Optical Communications Telescope Laboratory at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s Table Mountain Facility near Wrightwood, California.
The first signal received by Psyche’s transceiver helped the device aim its laser back to the Hale Telescope, located about 100 miles (160 kilometers) south of Table Mountain.
“The (Nov. 14) test was the first to fully integrate ground assets and flight transceiver and required the DSOC and Psyche operations teams to work together,” said Meera Srinivasan, DSOC operations leader at JPL in Pasadena, California. In a statement. “It was a challenge and we still have a lot of work to do, but we managed to transmit, receive and decode some data for a short period of time.”
This isn’t the first time laser communications have been tested in space. The first test of two-way laser communications occurred in December 2021, when NASA’s Laser Communications Relay Demonstration launched and entered orbit approximately 22,000 miles (35,406 kilometers) from Earth.
Experiments have since sent optical communications to the moon from low Earth orbit. And the Artemis II spacecraft will use laser communications to send back high-definition video of a crewed journey around the moon. But DSOC marks the first time laser communications have been sent into deep space; This requires incredibly precise aiming and aiming over millions of kilometers.
The first test of the technology demo’s capabilities will allow the team to work on improving the systems used in the laser’s pointing accuracy. Once the team checks this box, DSOC will be ready to send and receive data to and from the Hale Telescope as the spacecraft moves further away from Earth.
future challenges
While the DSOC will not be sending scientific data collected by the Psyche spacecraft because it is essentially an experiment, the laser will be used to send bits of test data encoded in the laser’s photons, or quantum particles of light.
Detector arrays on Earth can receive the signal from Psyche and extract data from the photons. This type of optical communication could transform the way NASA sends and receives data from its missions in deep space.
Director of the Advanced Communications and Navigation Technologies Division of NASA’s Space Communications and Navigation Division, Dr. “Optical communications are a boon for scientists and researchers who always want more from space missions, and will allow humans to explore deep space,” said Jason Mitchell. program in a statement. “More data means more discovery.”
More challenges await as Psyche continues her journey.
The DSOC team will monitor how long it takes laser messages to travel through space. During first light, it took only 50 seconds for the laser to reach Earth from Psyche. At the farthest distance between the spacecraft and Earth, the laser is expected to take 20 minutes to travel in one direction. And during this time, the spacecraft will continue to move and the Earth will rotate.
Meanwhile, the Psyche spacecraft continues to prepare for its primary mission by powering up its propulsion systems and testing the scientific instruments it will need to study the asteroid when it arrives in July 2029. The mission could determine whether the asteroid has an early exposed core. Planetary building block from the beginning of the solar system.
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