NASA mission achieves maximum demonstration of laser communications across space

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Innovative flying experience on board NASA’s psychological mission It has just achieved its first major achievement by successfully implementing the farthest demonstration of laser communications. The technology demonstration could one day help NASA missions delve deeper into space and uncover more discoveries about the origin of the universe.

The Psyche probe was launched in mid-October and is currently on track to capture humanity’s first look at a metallic asteroid located 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 the journey he is Demonstration of optical communications technology in deep spaceor DSOC, which carries out its own mission during the first two years of the flight.

The technology demonstration is designed to be NASA’s farthest experiment in high-bandwidth laser communications, testing the transmission and reception of data to and from Earth using an invisible near-infrared laser. The laser can transmit data at 10 to 100 times the speed of conventional radio wave systems used by NASA on other missions. If this experiment is fully successful within the next two years, it could be the future foundation of technology used to communicate with humans exploring Mars.

DSOC recently achieved what engineers call “first light,” the feat of successfully sending and receiving its first data.

The experiment fired a laser encoded with data from beyond the moon for the first time. Test data was transmitted from about 10 million miles (16 million km) away and reached the Hale Telescope at Caltech’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 important milestones for DSOC in the coming months, paving the way toward higher data rate communications capable of sending scientific information, high-definition images and streaming video to support humanity’s next giant leap: sending humans,” said Trudy Curtis, Promotion Director. Technologist at NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate, in a statement: “To Mars.”

The first light, which occurred on November 14, occurred when the flight laser transceiver instrument on Psyche received a laser beacon transmitted from the Optical Communications Telescope Laboratory at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s Table Mountain Facility near Wrightwood, California.

The initial beacon received by Psyche’s transceiver helped the device direct the laser to send data 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 and flight transponder assets, requiring the DSOC and Psyche operations teams to work side-by-side,” said Meera Srinivasan, DSOC operations lead at JPL, located in Pasadena, California. . In the current situation. “It was a huge challenge, and we have a lot of work to do, but for a short time, we were able to send, receive and decrypt some data.”

This is not the first time laser communications have been tested in space. The first test of two-way laser communication was performed in December 2021 when NASA’s laser communications relay demonstration was launched and went into orbit about 22,000 miles (35,406 kilometers) from Earth.

Since then, experiments have sent optical communications from low Earth orbit to the Moon. The Artemis II spacecraft will use laser communications to return High definition video of the crew’s flight About the moon. But DSOC represents the first time laser communications have been sent across deep space, which requires extremely precise aiming and pointing millions of miles away.

Initial testing of the technology’s demonstration capabilities will allow the team to work on improving the systems used for laser guidance accuracy. Once the team checks this box, DSOC will be ready to send and receive data to the Hale Telescope as the spacecraft travels away from Earth.

While DSOC will not actually send back the scientific data collected by the Psyche spacecraft because it is an experiment, a laser will be used to send back parts of the test data encoded in laser photons, or quantum light particles.

Detector arrays on Earth could pick up the signal from Psyche and extract data from the photons. This type of visual communication could Changing the way NASA sends and receives data from its missions across deep space.