NASA’s Deep Space Optical Communications (DSOC) unit on board the Psyche spacecraft is active. It established a super-speed laser data link at a distance of 16 million km, or 40 times the distance from Earth to the Moon.
For many years NASA has been very interested in developing practical laser communications systems for space missions and, as a result, has conducted increasingly ambitious tests of the technology.
The reason is that the space agency is currently overcoming obstacles caused by the 1960s-era radio system used for mission communications. This works, but the data speed is very slow, around 10 Mbit/s on a good day.
Reporting from New Atlas (11/28), the technology from DSOC can offer downlink speeds of up to 200 Mbit/s – and that’s just for testing the technology. The difficult thing is to expand the range of the communication system and see whether the system can still handle the problem of data loss caused by the earth’s atmosphere as well as ensuring that the uplink and downlink lasers can stay on target during transmission tests.
The first data collection from a distance of 16 million km may seem like a reliable journey, but it was not easy considering NASA’s goals. Psyche is on its way to the metallic asteroid of the same name in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. The distance is so far that when Earth and Psyche are at their furthest, the laser message takes 20 minutes to travel that distance. This also means that the system must compensate for the movement of its target during the time delay.
2023-11-28 11:16:32
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