by Late last year, NASA scientists pushed for the start of a much-anticipated space mission. Basically, they sent a spacecraft towards an asteroid that could very well be made of metal, a composition that seems to be rare — at least, in the vicinity of our solar system. The robotic adventurer is called Psyche, and his name is the huge rock that guides his journey: 16 Psyche.
However, Psyche also has a side quest: Laser communication.
On board Psyche, among its asteroid study equipment, there is a technological demonstration known as the Deep Space Optical Communications, or DSOC. DSOC aims to show that it is possible laser communication to be done across cosmic distances, allowing for high-bandwidth, much faster connectivity between humans and the probes they send to the final frontier. To be precise, the communication rates are meant to be between 10 and 100 times faster than what we are working with now. And significantly, on April 8, it would appear that DSOC achieved several milestones.
Not only did it transmit data to Earth from the Psyche site at the time, some 140 million miles (225 million kilometers) away – a transgressive distance greater than the gap between our planet and the sun – but it also successfully transmitted information spread back. received directly from the spacecraft. This means that the DSOC transceiver actually interfaced with Psyche’s radio transmitter and sent back concrete engineering data within the craft.
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“We captured about 10 minutes of duplicate spacecraft data during the April 8 flyby,” Meera Srinivasan, project operations leader at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California, said in a statement. statement. It was “duplicated” data, because the “original” Psyche data, if you will, went to ground control via standard radio-frequency communication channels on NASA’s Deep Space Network (DSN). The scientists just wanted to see if laser comms would work just as well, if not better.
However, this duplicate data acquisition is in itself a big deal for the experiment; While DSOC has been making headlines recently for various other milestones, there was a caveat. For example, in November last year when it beamed data back to Earth from 10 million miles (16 million km) away, and more recently during a “surround test” in which scientists pinged the experiment with matter, then found that matter pinged back, DSOC wasn’t backing down. any “real” information. It was preloaded test data that could be pulled out on command.
“We were sending test and diagnostic data in our downlinks from Psyche,” Srinivasan said. “This is a significant milestone for the project by showing how optical communication can interface with a spacecraft’s radio frequency communication system.”
And now, if you’re wondering how the rate tests are going for DSOC, we’ll have to go into the cat video.
Cat video
Recall how all previous DSOC data was test information created by team scientists. Well, scientists are only human, after all.
In December of last year, DSOC hit a few more checkpoints en route to Psyche’s destination. First, it returned data from 19 million miles (31 million km) away (which I guess is not much compared to today’s 140-million-mile journey, but it was huge at the time) . Second, the information it returned traveled at the system’s maximum rate of 267 megawatts per second (Mbps) so it took something like 101 seconds to reach each Earth. This, NASA explains, is equivalent to broadband internet download speeds.
And thirdly, one part of the data was a cloud Taters video. Who is Taters, you ask? Well, a sweet little orange tabby cat, of course. (That would be an orange cat, wouldn’t it?) This is also probably a good time to do some of the recent “round test” data related to pet pics as well.
During the April 8 test, however, DSOC did not achieve its data transmission rates as it did for the Taters video. The message arrived at DSOC’s main downlink ground station at Caltech’s Palomar Observatory in San Diego County, traveling at a maximum rate of 25 Mbps, NASA writes in the statement – although emphasizing how that level exceeds the project’s goal of 1 Mbps on least at least. distance of this kind.
One issue that seems to have arisen for the team is the fact that DSOC requires Mother Nature to cooperate. On the other hand, DSN communication is not very weather dependent. “We’ve learned a lot about how far we can push the system when we have clear skies, although storms have disrupted operations at both Table Mountain and Palomar,” said Ryan Rogalin, the project’s receiver electronics lead. at JPL. in the statement.
The JPL Table Mountain Facility is a place The DSOC Ground Laser Transmitter instrument is located, and interestingly, NASA explains that the laboratory recently tried to combine that instrument with a DSN optical antenna as well as Palomar equipment to see if the same signal can be coordinated simultaneously. The goal was to see if it would be possible to switch between stations if there is extremely bad weather in one area, forcing some instruments to be turned off.
Related Stories:
— NASA’s Psyche asteroid mission will test next-generation laser communications in space
– NASA’s Psyche spacecraft has just fired a laser 10 million miles away in deep space
— Metal asteroid Psyche has a ‘ridiculous high value’. But what does that even mean?
It will be interesting to see how things shake out with deep space laser communications in the future, and DSOC seems to be aiming for a promising outcome. A high-speed link between space explorers and the rest of humanity on Earth would mean clearer cosmic images, a smoother transition for our species as engineers look towards making moves on Mars and more advanced science in general.
As Ken Andrews, head of project flight operations at JPL, said: “There was little downlinking of data over a short period of time, but the fact that we are doing it now exceeds all our expectations.”
I mean, at least maybe laser comms will lead us towards getting cute pictures of alien pets someday?
