At NASA It has one of the most advanced centers in the world for space exploration and planetary research called Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL)Located in Pasadena, California, JPL has nothing more and nothing less than the responsibility of designing, building and operating NASA’s most ambitious missions, including robotic explorers such as the rovers that have landed on Mars or the Deep Space Optical Communications (DSOC), an experimental system of optical lasers to send and receive information from distant destinations.
Most of these JPL missions remain very secretive. However, On December 11, the aforementioned DSOC systemmade the most distant communication ever achieved, establishing a record distance of 31 million kilometersthat is, 80 times the distance between the Earth and the Moon. The success of this new telescope revolutionizes the way we communicate with spacecraft in deep space, opening up new possibilities for the exploration and study of the universe.
Video transmitted from deep space
It is a video of no more than 15 seconds that was launched from the Psyche space probea probe that is traveling towards the famous asteroid belt located between Mars and Jupiter. Here’s the funny thing, because the images show a small orange cat named Taters playing with a laser on an armchair. The video took a while one minute 41 seconds to reach Earthsince the DSOC system can achieve a maximum speed of 267 megabits per second.
Furthermore, unlike traditional methods that use radio waves to transmit data through space, The DSOC operates using its novel flight laser transceiverwhich dramatically increases the amount of data that can be sent from a spacecraft to Earth. In this way, it allows the transmission of High-definition videos, detailed images and large volumes of scientific data with unprecedented speed.
The future of space communications
Bill Klipstein, technical demonstration project manager at JPLexplains that the system is capable of sending and receiving signals in the near-infrared, a type of infrared radiation commonly used in astronomical research. To demonstrate its effectiveness, the researchers sent a laser signal encoded in the near-infrared to the telescope Hale at Caltech’s Palomar Observatory, located in San Diego County, California.
Deep Space Optical Communications Technology DemonstrationJLP
The images were downloaded there, and each frame of the video was then transmitted in real time to JPL, where they could instantly play it back. Klipstein says, “One of the biggest goals of DSOC is to demonstrate the ability to transmit broadband video over millions of kilometers. Nothing in Psyche was generating video data, so we usually sent randomly generated test data packets.”
Now The goal is to increase bandwidth for future exploration missions and thus satisfy the communication needs with the Earth.
