NASA’s Psyche spacecraft has achieved a significant milestone by sending a laser transmission from a record-breaking 140 million miles away. This feat could have major implications for the future of space travel. The spacecraft is currently located approximately 1.5 times the distance between Earth and the Sun.
The transmission was made possible by a feature on Psyche called Deep Space Optical Communications (DSOC). The DSOC’s main directive is exploring 16 Psyche, the $100,000 quadrillion asteroid from which the spacecraft takes its name. NASA aims to demonstrate the potential for laser communications to be conducted across interstellar distances, allowing for high bandwidth and a much speedier connection between humans and the probes they send into space.
This achievement was particularly significant as NASA managed to transmit actual data gathered from the spacecraft. “We downlinked about 10 minutes of duplicated spacecraft data,” explained Meera Srinivasan, the project’s operations lead at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California.
This marked the culmination of a series of messages sent by the probe since it launched on October 13th atop a SpaceX Falcon Heavy Rocket. During a prior dry run in December, Psyche beamed data back from 19 million miles away, sending it at the system’s maximum rate of 267 megabits per second. This correspondence took around just over a minute and a half to reach earth, which is comparable to broadband internet speeds.
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