This milestone is a great example of how spacecraft could use optical messaging in the future, allowing for higher data rate communications of complex information.
The POT wants to improve communications from deep space, especially as astronauts prepare to return to Earth. Moon with an eye on Mars. For this reason, the US aerospace agency is working on the development of its Deep Space Optical Communications System (DSOC), which has just unveiled one of its greatest achievements.
First it was the Taters kitten who starred in December 2023 in the first video transmitted by laser from deep space. But this April, NASA received a laser message from the Psyche probethe same one that made Taters famous, located at the time of communication at 226 million kilometers, 1 and a half times the distance between the Earth and the Sun.
“We transmitted about 10 minutes of duplicate data from the spacecraft during a test on April 8,” he said. Meera Srinivasan, project operations leader at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. “Until then, we had been sending test and diagnostic data on our downlinks from Psyche. This represents an important milestone for the project by showing how optical communications can interface with a spacecraft’s radio frequency communications system,” he added.
This milestone is a great example of how spacecraft could use optical communications in the future, allowing higher data speed communications of complex information, as well as high-definition images and videos.
And for this achievement, Psyche has been used again, a probe launched to study Psyche-16, one of the largest objects in the asteroid belt located between Jupiter and Mars. It is believed that its surface is full of iron, nickel and valuable minerals such as gold, and it even has a magnetic field like the one that allows life on Earth.
