FILE: Psyche: NASA’s mission to a metallic world
SpaceX will launch NASA’s Psyche spacecraft to a metallic asteroid by the same name later this year.
NASA recently achieved its farthest-ever demonstration of laser, or optical, communications, News that was announced on Thursday.
Using a near-infrared laser, NASA’s Deep Space Optical Communications (DSOC) experiment beamed test data from nearly 10 million miles away to the Hale Telescope at Caltech’s Palomar Observatory.
Deep Space Optical Communications system’s gold-capped flight laser transceiver can be seen near center, attached to the Psyche spacecraft. (Ben Smegelsky / NASA)
This milestone, known as “first light”, marks a significant step toward increasing the amount of data that can be transmitted throughout the solar system.
“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,” said Trudy Kortes, director of Technology Demonstrations at NASA Headquarters in Washington, D.C.
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NASA compared the upgrade to optical communications to the shift from traditional telephone lines to fiber optics, highlighting the potential to increase the transmission capacity of current spacecraft radio systems by 10 to 100 times.
The Deep Space Optical Communications (DSOC) technology demonstration’s flight laser transceiver is shown at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California in April 2021, before being installed inside its box-like enclosure that was later integrated with NASA’s Psyche spacecraft. (JPL-Caltech / NASA)
This experiment marks NASA’s first demonstration of optical communications beyond the Moon. It is composed of a flight laser transceiver, a ground laser transmitter, and a ground laser receiver.
The transceiver was installed on NASA’s Psyche spacecraft at its launch on Oct. 13 and is part of the craft’s mission to study the asteroid Psyche 16, a metal-rich body in the asteroid belt.
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The spacecraft embedded with DSOC completed a significant milestone within the first phase of its two-phase mission.
