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An innovative experiment aboard NASA’s Psyche mission has achieved its first major milestone with the farthest demonstration of laser communication yet. The technology demonstration could one day help NASA missions explore deeper into space and make more discoveries about the origins of the universe.
Launched in mid-October, Psyche is currently on its way to get humanity’s first glimpse of a metal asteroid 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.
Adjacent to the ride is the Deep Space Optical Communications, or DSOC, technology exhibit, which is completing its own mission during the first two years of the ride.
The technology demonstration was designed to be the US space agency’s most far-reaching experiment in high-bandwidth laser communications, testing the sending and receiving of data to and from Earth using invisible infrared lasers. The laser can send data at 10 to 100 times the speed of traditional radio wave systems used by NASA on other missions. If fully successful in the next few years, this experiment could become the future basis for the technology used to communicate with human explorers on Mars.
And DSOC recently achieved what the engineers called “first light”, the feat of sending and receiving its first data.
In this experiment a laser was encoded with data from far beyond the moon for the first time. The test data was sent nearly 10 million miles (16 million kilometers) away and reached the Hale Telescope at the California Institute of Technology’s Palomar Observatory in Pasadena, California.
The distance between DSOC and Hale was about 40 times that of the moon from Earth.
“Achieving first light is one of many critical DSOC milestones in the coming months, paving the way for higher data rate communications capable of streaming scientific information, high definition imagery, and video to support it humanity’s next giant leap: sending people. to Mars,” Trudy Kortes, technology demonstration director for the Space Technology Mission Directorate at NASA, said in a statement.
Sending lasers across space
The first light, which occurred on November 14, occurred when the flight laser transceiver instrument on Psyche received a laser beacon sent 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 instrument aim its laser to send data back to the Hale Telescope, located about 100 miles (160 kilometers) south of Table Mountain.
“The test (on November 14) was the first to fully incorporate the ground assets and the flight transceiver, which required the DSOC and Psyche operations teams to work together,” said Meera Srinivasan, chief of operations DSOC at JPL, based in Pasadena, California, said in a statement. “It was a great challenge, and we have a lot more work to do, but for a short time, we were able to transmit, receive and decode some data.”
This is not the first time that laser communication has been tested in space. The first test of two-way laser communication occurred in December 2021 when NASA’s Laser Communications Relay Demonstrator launched and entered an orbit about 22,000 miles (35,406 kilometers) from Earth.
Since then, experiments have launched optical communications from low-Earth orbit and to the moon. And the Artemis II spacecraft will use laser communications to return high-definition video of a crewed trip around the moon. But DSOC is the first time laser communications have been launched across deep space, which requires extremely precise aiming and targeting over millions of miles.
The initial test of the technology’s demonstration capabilities will allow the team to work on refining the systems used in the laser’s pointing accuracy. Once the team has checked that box, DSOC will be ready to send and receive data to the Hale Telescope as the spacecraft travels further from Earth.
Future challenges
Although DSOC will not send scientific data collected by the Psyche spacecraft because it is an experiment, the laser will be used to send bits of test data encoded in the laser’s photons, or quantum particles of light.
Sensor arrays on Earth can pick up the signal from Psyche and extract the data from the photons. This type of optical communication could change the way NASA sends and receives data from its deep space missions.
“Optical communication is a boon for scientists and researchers who are always asking for more from their space missions, and will enable humans to explore deep space,” said Dr. Jason Mitchell, director of the Advanced Communications and Navigation Technologies Division within NASA’s Space Communications and Navigation. program, in a statement. “More data means more discovery.”
As Psyche continues her journey, more challenges await.
The DSOC team will be monitoring how long it takes for the laser messages to travel across space. During the first light, it took only 50 seconds for the laser to travel from Psyche to Earth. At the longest distance between the spacecraft and Earth, the laser is estimated to take 20 minutes to travel one way. And during that time, the spacecraft will continue to move and the Earth will continue to rotate.
Meanwhile, the Psyche spacecraft continues to prepare for its primary mission, powering up propulsion systems and testing the scientific instruments it will need to study the asteroid when it arrives in July 2029. The mission could determine whether the asteroid’s core is soon exposed. a planetary building block from the beginning of the solar system.
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