A laser message that was just received by Earth from a record-breaking 140 million miles distant in space may have significant ramifications for space travel in the future.
The sender of this letter, NASA’s Psyche mission, which is presently situated around 1.5 times the distance between Earth and the Sun, wasn’t extraterrestrial, though.
“This represents a significant milestone for the project by showing how optical communications can interface with a spacecraft’s radio frequency comms system,” said a statement from Meera Srinivasan, the project operations lead at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California.
Deep Space Optical Communications, or DSOC, is a Psyche feature that was used to accomplish this significant achievement. Its primary mission is to investigate 16 Psyche, the name-giving $100,000 quadrillion asteroid.
NASA aimed to demonstrate the possibility of interstellar laser communications, which would enable high bandwidth and a significantly faster connection—up to a hundred times faster than what’s currently possible—between people and their spacecraft.
This accomplishment was especially noteworthy because NASA was able to transmit real data from the spacecraft in addition to the laser message traveling a record-breaking distance.
According to Srinivasan, “we downlinked about ten minutes of duplicate spacecraft data.” “Until then, we’d been sending test and diagnostic data in our downlinks from Psyche.”
To clarify, Psyche was launched back to Earth in November of last year from a distance of 10 million miles, but the data it returned was test data that had been pre-loaded rather than “real” information.
This was the final transmission that the probe sent after taking off atop a SpaceX Falcon Heavy Rocket on October 13.
In a previous test run in December, Psyche transmitted data at the system’s top speed of 267 megabits per second while beaming it back from a distance of 19 million miles.
It took this letter, which included video of Taters, an orange tabby cat, slightly more than a minute and a half to get to Earth, which is similar to the speed of broadband internet.
This most recent DSOC transmission, in comparison, only had 25 megabits. This resulted from Psyche’s seven-fold greater distance from Earth, which slowed down its message-sending and receiving speed.
This exceeded the project’s objective of “proving at least 1 Mbps was possible at that distance,” according to the statement, even though the speed was very slow.
NASA stated that this historic occasion offers a taste of how spacecraft “could use optical communications in support of humanity’s next giant leap: sending humans to Mars.”
By 2026, Psyche is expected to pass by the Red Planet and proceed toward 16 Psyche, its primary target, which it should arrive at by 2029.
Its goal is to map out this last frontier, El Dorado, which has enough precious metals in it to bring down the gold market, much like the early settlers did in their quest for the Northwest Passage.