Breaking Barriers: NASA Receives Laser Communication from 10 Million Miles Away
NASA's Psyche mission achieves a groundbreaking milestone as it successfully sends and receives deep-space laser communications from over 10 million miles away, marking a significant advancement in space communication technology
Subscribe to CNN's Wonder Theory science newsletter and stay updated on the latest news about the universe, including groundbreaking discoveries and scientific advancements. Recently, NASA's Psyche mission achieved a significant milestone with an innovative experiment that demonstrated the farthest use of laser communications. This breakthrough technology has the potential to allow NASA missions to explore deeper into space and unlock new insights into the origins of the universe.
Launched in mid-October, Psyche is on its way to capture humanity's initial view of a metallic asteroid located between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. Over the next six years, the spacecraft will travel about 2.2 billion miles (3.6 billion kilometers) to reach its namesake in the outer region of the main asteroid belt. Joining the mission is the Deep Space Optical Communications technology demonstration, or DSOC, which will conduct its own mission during the first two years of the journey.
The high-bandwidth laser communications tech demo was created by the US space agency to conduct its most remote experiment, testing data transmission to and from Earth using an invisible near-infrared laser. This laser is capable of sending data at speeds 10 to 100 times faster than the traditional radio wave systems NASA uses on other missions. If successful in the coming years, this experiment could pave the way for future communication technology used to connect with humans exploring Mars. Recently, DSOC achieved a milestone known as "first light," successfully sending and receiving its initial data, as hailed by engineers.
For the first time, a laser encoded with data from beyond the moon was beamed as part of an experiment. The test data, transmitted from nearly 10 million miles (16 million kilometers) away, successfully reached the Hale Telescope at the California Institute of Technologys Palomar Observatory in Pasadena, California.
The Deep Space Optical Communications team at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, worked in the early morning hours of November 14 in the Psyche mission support area to witness the "first light."
The distance between DSOC and Hale was approximately 40 times greater than the distance from the moon to Earth.
Trudy Kortes, the director of technology demonstrations for the Space Technology Mission Directorate at NASA, stated that achieving first light is a crucial milestone for DSOC in the upcoming months, which will enable higher data rate communications for sending scientific information, high-definition imagery, and streaming video to support the goal of sending humans to Mars.
Laser communication across space
The first light event occurred on November 14 when the Psyche spacecraft's flight laser transceiver received a laser beacon from the Optical Communications Telescope Laboratory at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory's Table Mountain Facility near Wrightwood, California.
The initial beacon received by the transceiver on Psyche helped the instrument aim its laser to send data back to the Hale Telescope, which is approximately 100 miles (160 kilometers) south of Table Mountain.
"The test on November 14 was the first to fully incorporate ground assets and the flight transceiver, requiring the DSOC and Psyche operations teams to collaborate," Meera Srinivasan, operations lead for DSOC at JPL in Pasadena, California, stated. "It was a significant challenge, and we have more work ahead, but for a brief period, we were able to successfully transmit, receive, and decode data."
The operators of the DSOC ground laser transmitter conducted their first experiment at the Optical Communications Telescope Laboratory located at JPL's Table Mountain Facility near Wrightwood, California.
In December 2021, NASA's Laser Communications Relay Demonstration successfully launched into space and conducted the first two-way laser communication test at a distance of 22,000 miles (35,406 kilometers) from Earth. This marked a significant advancement in the testing of laser communications in space.
Experiments have successfully sent optical communications from low-Earth orbit to the moon. The upcoming Artemis II spacecraft will utilize laser communications to capture high-definition video of a crewed journey around the moon. This marks a milestone, as DSOC will send laser communications across deep space, necessitating incredibly precise aiming and pointing over millions of miles.
The first test of the technology will allow the team to improve the accuracy of the laser pointing systems. Once this is achieved, DSOC will be able to send and receive data to the Hale Telescope as the spacecraft ventures farther from Earth.
Future challenges
DSOC will not transmit actual scientific data collected by the Psyche spacecraft due to it being an experiment. Instead, the laser will be utilized to transmit small amounts of test data encoded in the photons of the laser, or quantum light particles.
Detector arrays on Earth are capable of detecting the signal from Psyche and retrieving data from the photons. This form of optical communication has the potential to revolutionize NASA's data transmission for its deep space missions. According to Dr. Jason Mitchell, the director of the Advanced Communications and Navigation Technologies Division at NASA, optical communication is a valuable tool for scientists and researchers looking to maximize the potential of their space missions, and it will facilitate human exploration of deep space. The increased data capacity will lead to more significant discoveries.
The University of Utah and the University of Tokyo, along with the Telescope Array Collaboration, have observed an exceedingly energetic cosmic ray. This particle has been dubbed the "Amaterasu particle," as depicted in the artist's illustration.
Osaka Metropolitan University/L-INSIGHT, Kyoto University/Ryuunosuke Takeshige
Mysterious cosmic ray observed in Utah came from beyond our galaxy, scientists say
As Psyche progresses on its journey, it will face further challenges. The DSOC team will be closely monitoring the travel time of the laser messages through space. During the initial test, it only took 50 seconds for the laser to travel from Psyche to Earth. However, at the farthest distance between the spacecraft and Earth, the laser is expected to take 20 minutes for a one-way trip. This means that the spacecraft will continue to move and Earth will rotate during that time.
The Psyche spacecraft is actively gearing up for its main mission, as it starts up its propulsion systems and conducts tests on the scientific equipment required to analyze the asteroid when it reaches its destination in July 2029. This mission has the potential to reveal if the asteroid is the uncovered core of a primordial planetary structure from the early days of the solar system.
