This redefined long distance calling.
Earth has received a world (and possibly space) record-breaking laser transmission 140 million miles away. This could have a huge impact on the future of space travel.
However, this communication was not originally from extraterrestrial sources. It was actually sent by NASA’s Psyche spacecraft, which is located about 1.5 times the distance between Earth and the Sun today.
“This is an important milestone for the project by demonstrating how optical communications can work with a spacecraft’s radio frequency communications system,” said the project’s operations manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. said Meera Srinivasan, who is in charge. said in a statement.
This major advance was achieved by using a psychedelic feature called Deep Space Optical Communications (DSOC), which is one of the droid’s several tasks. space dot com. Its main mandate is to explore the $100,000 asteroid it takes its name from, 16 Psyche.
NASA expects laser communications to occur across interstellar distances, allowing for high bandwidth and much faster connections between humans and space-bound spacecraft, 10 to 100 times faster than what is currently available. We wanted to show the potential of becoming.
This accomplishment was especially important because in addition to sending laser messages to record distances, NASA also managed to send actual data collected from the spacecraft.
“We downlinked about 10 minutes of replicated spacecraft data,” Srinivasan explained. “Until then, we were sending test and diagnostic data over the downlink from Psyche.”
So when Psyche sent it back to Earth last November from 10 million miles away, it was pre-loaded test data and no “real” information.
This was the culmination of a series of messages sent by the spacecraft since its launch on Oct. 13 aboard SpaceX’s Falcon heavy rocket.
During a preliminary dry run in December, Psyche beamed data from 19 million miles away, transmitting data at the system’s maximum speed of 267 megabits per second.
The transmission, which included footage of an orange tabby cat named Taters, took about a minute and a half to reach Earth. This is comparable to broadband internet speeds.
In contrast, this modern DSOC transmission was only 25 megabits. This was because Psyche was seven times as far away as he was, which slowed down the speed at which messages could be sent and received.
Despite the relatively sweet speeds, the project’s goal of “proving that at least 1 Mbps is possible over that distance” was not achieved, according to the release.
This tipping point, NASA writes, shows how the spacecraft “could use optical communications to support humanity’s next great leap forward: sending humans to Mars.”
Psyche is scheduled to fly by the Red Planet by 2026, then fly to its primary destination of 16 Psyche, arriving by 2029.
Similar to the early settlers’ quest for the Northwest Passage, they will aim to map this final frontier, El Dorado, which contains enough precious metals to crash the gold market.
