A message from NASA's Psyche spacecraft, which is located about 10 million miles away, was successfully beamed to Earth.
Just now, a deep-space test of a NASA laser was completed successfully.
NASA detected a laser signal on November 14th, coming from an instrument that was launched along with the Psyche spacecraft. The spacecraft is currently travelling over 10 million miles (16 million kilometres) from Earth in the direction of an unidentified metal asteroid. (The spacecraft is still travelling far, having travelled more than 40 times the moon's average distance from Earth.)
This was the first time NASA's Deep Space Optical Communications (DSOC) system, a next-generation communications link that transmits data via laser light rather than radio waves, had been successfully tested. It is a component of an array of experiments NASA is conducting on various missions to accelerate communications in deep space.
"Reaching first light is an amazing accomplishment. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California's Abi Biswas, the system's project technologist, said in an agency statement that "the ground systems successfully detected the deep space laser photons from DSOC."
"And we were also able to send some data, meaning we were able to exchange 'bits of light' from and to deep space," Biswas stated.
While laser communications have been tested in Earth orbit and during missions to the moon and back, DSOC provides the most challenging and far-reaching test of laser communications to date. If it works, NASA officials anticipate that astronauts travelling to Mars or the moon in the next few decades may be able to use laser light to communicate with ground control.
At JPL's Table Mountain Facility in California, the DSOC test got underway. In the hills beyond Los Angeles, technicians activated an uplink beacon, directing a near-infrared laser towards Psyche. After Psyche's transceiver picked up the laser, it took about 50 seconds to send a laser signal back to Palomar Observatory, which is located close to San Diego.
Psyche's own laser is aimed with the assistance of automated guidance systems to achieve the task's astronomical precision. However, if the test is successful, there are many advantages: Using optical light would enable space missions to transmit 10 to 100 times more information per unit of time than they do now because laser light has shorter wavelengths than radio waves.
Engineers will keep testing the system while Psyche travels to its namesake asteroid, which is located in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. The test on November 14 marked "first light" for DSOC. After arriving in 2029, Psyche will spend 29 months exploring the strange metallic world.