NASA received a laser-beamed message from 10 million miles away. The message was sent from the space agency’s Psych Mission. The laser beam reached the Hale Telescope at the California Institute of Technology’s Palomar Observatory in Pasadena, California.
The laser can send data at up to 100 times the speed of traditional radio wave systems used by NASA. Laser communications use light to transmit information over long distances. This technology could help scientists explore space and learn more about the origin of the universe.
Launched in mid-October, Psyche is currently en route to catch humanity’s first glimpse of a metal asteroid between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter.
The spacecraft will spend the next six years traveling about 2.2 billion miles (3.6 billion kilometers) to reach its namesake, located in the outer part of the main asteroid belt.
Along for the ride is the Deep Space Optical Communications technology demonstration, or DSOC, which is carrying out a mission of its own during the first two years of the journey.
The tech demo was designed to be the US space agency’s most distant experiment of high-bandwidth laser communications, testing the sending and receiving of data to and from Earth using an invisible near-infrared laser.
The laser can send data at 10 to 100 times the speed of traditional radio wave systems NASA uses on other missions. If wholly successful over the next couple of years, this experiment could be the future basis of technology that is used to communicate with humans exploring Mars.
And DSOC recently achieved what engineers called “first light,” the feat of successfully sending and receiving its first data. The experiment beamed a laser encoded with data from far beyond the moon for the first time.
The test data was sent from nearly 10 million miles (16 million kilometers) away and reached the Hale Telescope at the California Institute of Technology’s Palomar Observatory in Pasadena, California. The distance between DSOC and Hale was about 40 times farther than the moon is from Earth.
“Achieving first light is one of many critical DSOC milestones in the coming months, paving the way toward higher-data-rate communications capable of sending scientific information, high-definition imagery, and streaming video in support of humanity’s next giant leap: sending humans to Mars,” said Trudy Kortes, director of technology demonstrations for the Space Technology Mission Directorate at NASA, in a statement.
Detector arrays on Earth can pick up the signal from Psyche and extract the data from the photons. This kind of optical communicationcouldchange the way NASA sends and receives data from its missions across deep space.
“Optical communication is a boon for scientists and researchers who always want more from their space missions, and will enable human exploration of deep space,” said Dr. Jason Mitchell, director of the Advanced Communications and Navigation Technologies Division within NASA’s Space Communications and Navigation program, in a statement. “More data means more discoveries.” As Psyche continues on its journey, more challenges await.
The DSOC team will be monitoring how long it takes for the laser messages to travel across space. During first light, it took only 50 seconds for the laser to travel from Psyche to Earth. At the farthest distance between the spacecraft and Earth, the laser is expected to take 20 minutes to travel one way. And during that time, the spacecraft will continue to move and Earth will rotate.
Meanwhile, the Psyche spacecraft continues to prepare for its primary mission, powering on 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 is the exposed core of an early planetary building block from the beginning of the solar system.
