NASA, the US space agency, has announced that Earth has received an enigmatic signal from deep space. The signal originated from NASA’s new spacecraft, “Psyche,” some 140 million miles away.
NASA launched a space mission in October 2023 to explore Psyche 16, an asteroid that is thought to be mostly made of metal, which is unusual for an asteroid in our solar system. According to reports, the asteroid is situated between Mars and Jupiter in the asteroid belt.
This robotic explorer, named Psyche after the asteroid it is headed toward, also had a laser communications test to complete.
Psyche is equipped with the Deep Space Optical Communications (DSOC) system, which aims to make laser communication possible across vast distances in space, promising much faster connections than current methods.
Despite Psyche primarily using radio frequency communication, the optical communications technology has proven its capability. In a remarkable feat, the laser communications demo successfully transmitted engineering data from over 140 million miles away, which is 1.5 times the distance between Earth and the sun, after interfacing with Psyche’s radio frequency transmitter.
Psyche’s radio transmitter was successfully interfaced by the DSOC, enabling direct communication of engineering data and information from the spacecraft back to Earth.
During a pass on April 8, they downlinked roughly 10 minutes of duplicate spacecraft data, according to Meera Srinivasan, the project’s operations lead at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California. The initial Psyche data was sent to ground control via conventional radio-frequency communications channels on NASA’s Deep Space Network (DSN), whereas this duplicated data was sent via laser communications. The goal was to determine whether laser communications could function just as well as conventional techniques, if not more so.
NASA’s optical communications demonstration has demonstrated that it can use the near-infrared downlink laser of the flight laser transceiver to transmit test data at a maximum rate of 267 Mbps, which is comparable to broadband internet speeds.The data transmission rate is now lower, though, because the spacecraft is much farther away.
The spacecraft successfully transmitted test data at a maximum rate of 25 Mbps during a test on April 8, exceeding the project’s objective of demonstrating that at least 1 Mbps could be achieved at that distance.
As it approaches the asteroid Psyche 16, which is located between Mars and Jupiter, Psyche is said to be stable and in good condition.
