NASA just pulled off an incredible feat in space communication! A deep space experiment aboard NASA’s Psyche spacecraft beamed a laser message all the way from beyond the Moon for the first time ever. That’s like 16 million kilometers away – about 40 times farther than the Moon! This game-changing moment was brought to us by the Deep Space Optical Communications (DSOC) on board Psyche.
This optical communication experiment, DSOC, used a near-infrared laser to send test data to the Hale Telescope at Caltech’s Palomar Observatory in California. And get this, it’s the farthest demonstration of this kind of optical communication ever. The DSOC team made it happen on November 14, hitting what they call “first light.”
This two-year tech demo hitched a ride on Psyche, which is on its way to check out an asteroid also named Psyche. The team accomplished this by precisely maneuvering the laser transceiver to lock onto JPL’s laser beacon at the Table Mountain Observatory. That allowed DSOC to aim its laser at Caltech’s observatory over 100 miles away. Precision at its finest!
Trudy Kortes, director of Technology Demonstrations at NASA HQ, is pretty excited about it. She says hitting “first light” is just the beginning of many milestones to come. The plan? To revolutionize how we communicate in space. This optical communication tech aims to send data at rates 10-100 times faster than the best radio systems NASA uses now.
While NASA usually relies on radio waves to chat with missions beyond the Moon, lasers bring a lot more to the table. Think packing way more data into much tighter waves. And why does that matter? Because it opens the door for missions with super high-resolution instruments and lightning-fast communications. Imagine streaming live video from the surface of Mars – that’s the dream!
But, of course, there are challenges to tackle. The farther the laser has to travel, the trickier it gets. It needs pinpoint precision to hit the mark, and as it goes, the signal weakens, leading to potential lag times in communication. In the recent test, it took about 50 seconds for photons (the bits of light) to travel from Psyche to Earth. When Psyche is at its farthest, it’s going to take around 20 minutes for those photons to make the round trip. That means both Earth and the spacecraft will have moved, so the lasers need to adjust for this dance of positions.
Despite the challenges, this record-breaking tech demo is off to a fantastic start. Meera Srinivasan, operations lead for DSOC at JPL, called it a formidable challenge, but they’re on the right track. As Abi Biswas, project technologist for DSOC at JPL, put it, they were able to exchange “bits of light” to and from deep space. And who knows, this could be the future of how we talk in space exploration – exchanging bits of light across vast distances. How cool is that?