NASA’s Psyche mission recently achieved a groundbreaking milestone by successfully demonstrating the most distant use of laser communications. This technological test marks a significant achievement for space exploration and the search to discover more about the origins of the universe.
Launched in mid-October, the Psyche mission seeks to capture humanity’s first glimpse of a metallic asteroid located between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. Over the course of the next six years, the spacecraft will travel approximately 3.6 billion kilometers to reach the asteroid of the same name, located on the outer part of the main asteroid belt.
Additionally, the mission includes the Deep Space Optical Communications (DSOC) technology demonstration, which will carry out its own mission during the first two years of the trip. The DSOC experiment encompasses NASA’s furthest high-bandwidth laser communications experiment, testing the sending and receiving of data to and from Earth using an invisible near-infrared laser. This technology allows the laser to send data at a rate of 10 to 100 times the speed of traditional radio wave systems used by NASA on previous missions.
The recent milestone was marked by the successful “first light” achievement of the DSOC experiment, which involved emitting a laser encoded with data from nearly 16 million kilometers away. The data was sent to the Hale Telescope at the California Institute of Technology‘s Palomar Observatory in Pasadena, California. The achievement is significant as it demonstrated the ability to send and receive data over a distance approximately 40 times greater than the distance between the Moon and Earth.
Trudy Kortes, director of technology demonstrations for NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate, expressed excitement for the achievement, stating that it paves the way for higher data rate communications capable of sending scientific information, high-definition images, and streaming video to support future human exploration of Mars.
The DSOC experiment’s initial testing will allow the team to refine the systems used in laser pointing precision, and once completed, the experiment will be ready to send and receive data as the spacecraft moves further from Earth. This type of optical communication has the potential to revolutionize how NASA sends and receives data from its deep space missions.
As Psyche continues its journey, the DSOC team plans to monitor the time it takes for laser messages to travel through space. It was observed that during first light, the laser took only 50 seconds to travel from Psyche to Earth. However, at the farthest distance between the spacecraft and Earth, the laser is expected to take 20 minutes to travel in one direction. The team will also continue to prepare for the spacecraft’s primary mission, scheduled for July 2029, which aims to study the metallic asteroid and determine whether it is the exposed core of one of the first planetary building blocks since the beginning of the solar system.