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Innovative flying experience on board NASA’s psychological mission It has just achieved its first major achievement by successfully implementing the farthest demonstration of laser communications. The technology demonstration could one day help NASA missions delve deeper into space and uncover more discoveries about the origin of the universe.
The Psyche probe was launched in mid-October and is currently on track to capture humanity’s first look at a metallic asteroid located between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. The spacecraft will spend the next six years traveling about 2.2 billion miles (3.6 billion kilometers) to reach its namesake, located in the outer part of the main asteroid belt.
Along the journey he is Demonstration of optical communications technology in deep spaceor DSOC, which carries out its own mission during the first two years of the flight.
The technology demonstration is designed to be NASA’s farthest experiment in high-bandwidth laser communications, testing the transmission and reception of data to and from Earth using an invisible near-infrared laser. The laser can transmit data at 10 to 100 times the speed of conventional radio wave systems used by NASA on other missions. If this experiment is fully successful within the next two years, it could be the future foundation of technology used to communicate with humans exploring Mars.
DSOC recently achieved what engineers call “first light,” the feat of successfully sending and receiving its first data.
The experiment fired a laser encoded with data from beyond the moon for the first time. Test data was transmitted from about 10 million miles (16 million km) away and reached the Hale Telescope at Caltech’s Palomar Observatory in Pasadena, California.
NASA/JPL-Caltech
The Deep Space Optical Communications team worked during the early morning hours of November 14 in the Psyche mission support area at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, to witness “first light.”
The distance between DSOC and Hale was about 40 times farther than the Moon is from Earth.
“Achieving first light is one of many important milestones for DSOC in the coming months, paving the way toward higher data rate communications capable of sending scientific information, high-definition images and streaming video to support humanity’s next giant leap: sending humans,” said Trudy Curtis, Promotion Director. Technologist at NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate, in a statement: “To Mars.”
The first light, which occurred on November 14, occurred when the flight laser transceiver instrument on Psyche received a laser beacon transmitted from the Optical Communications Telescope Laboratory at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s Table Mountain Facility near Wrightwood, California.
The initial beacon received by Psyche’s transceiver helped the device direct the laser to send data back to the Hale Telescope, located about 100 miles (160 kilometers) south of Table Mountain.
“The (Nov. 14) test was the first to fully integrate ground and flight transponder assets, requiring the DSOC and Psyche operations teams to work side-by-side,” said Meera Srinivasan, DSOC operations lead at JPL, located in Pasadena, California. . In the current situation. “It was a huge challenge, and we have a lot of work to do, but for a short time, we were able to send, receive and decrypt some data.”
NASA/JPL-Caltech
DSOC’s ground-based laser transmitter operators were on site at the Optical Communications Telescope Laboratory at JPL’s Table Mountain Facility near Wrightwood, California, to conduct the first experiment.
This is not the first time laser communications have been tested in space. The first test of two-way laser communication was performed in December 2021 when NASA’s laser communications relay demonstration was launched and went into orbit about 22,000 miles (35,406 kilometers) from Earth.
Since then, experiments have sent optical communications from low Earth orbit to the Moon. The Artemis II spacecraft will use laser communications to return High definition video of the crew’s flight About the moon. But DSOC represents the first time laser communications have been sent across deep space, which requires extremely precise aiming and pointing millions of miles away.
Initial testing of the technology’s demonstration capabilities will allow the team to work on improving the systems used for laser guidance accuracy. Once the team checks this box, DSOC will be ready to send and receive data to the Hale Telescope as the spacecraft travels away from Earth.
While DSOC will not actually send back the scientific data collected by the Psyche spacecraft because it is an experiment, a laser will be used to send back parts of the test data encoded in laser photons, or quantum light particles.
Detector arrays on Earth could pick up the signal from Psyche and extract data from the photons. This type of visual communication could Changing the way NASA sends and receives data from its missions across deep space.
“Optical communication is a boon to scientists and researchers who always want more from their space missions, and will enable human exploration of deep space,” said Dr. Jason Mitchell, director of the Advanced Communications and Navigation Technologies Division in NASA’s Communications and Astronautics Division. The programme, in a statement. “More data means more discoveries.”
As Psyche continues on her journey, more challenges await her.
The DSOC team will monitor how long it takes for laser messages to travel through space. During first light, the laser took only 50 seconds to travel from Psyche to Earth. At the farthest distance between the spacecraft and Earth, the laser is expected to take 20 minutes to travel in one direction. During that time, the spacecraft will continue to move and the Earth will rotate.
Meanwhile, the Psyche spacecraft continues to prepare for its primary mission, running propulsion systems and testing the scientific instruments it will need to study the asteroid when it arrives in July 2029. The mission could determine whether the asteroid is the exposed core of an early planet. The building block of planets from the beginning of the solar system.
