NASA receives important signals from space, from a distance of 460 million kilometers

NASA received an important signal from space. It comes from hundreds of millions of kilometers away and is transmitted by lasers.

Washington, DC – The US space agency NASA set a new record: a space probe communicated with Earth via a laser from a distance of 460 million kilometers. What may seem trivial has an important background, as NASA employee Meera Srinivasan explains: “This achievement is of great importance. Laser communication requires a very high level of precision, and before we started we did not know how much performance would decrease at longer distances.

NASA experiment communicates with Earth via laser

The laser connection was improved through numerous tests over the course of about a year. “The techniques we use for tracking and guidance have now been verified, confirming that optical communications can be a powerful and transformative way to explore the solar system,” Srinivasan said. additional.

The device that communicates with Earth from space via laser is an experiment called Deep Space Optical Communications (DSOC). It is on board NASA's space probe “Psyche”, which launched to the asteroid of the same name “Psyche” on October 13, 2023. In several stages, DSOC sent data via laser to Earth, where NASA, among other things, identified , speed. In one such test, the experiment also sent a high-resolution video of the cat back to Earth.

NASA's laser communication aims to improve Mars exploration

The distance of 460 million kilometers from which the experiment sent data to Earth was not chosen by chance: it roughly corresponds to the greatest distance between Mars and Earth. And one of the things that fast laser communication on Mars is about is that if people are to live and work there in the future, communication will have to be faster and, above all, of better quality than was previously possible. Complex scientific information could then be sent more quickly across half of the solar system to Earth or Mars.

Laser communication is particularly well-suited for this purpose, as data can be transmitted up to 100 times faster than radio frequencies, according to NASA. These skills are needed “for humanity's next big leap, when astronauts travel to Mars and beyond.”

NASA sometimes transmits data from space at broadband speed

At a distance of 53 million kilometers (about the closest distance between Mars and Earth), it was still possible to send data at the fastest possible speed of 267 Mbit/s – comparable to broadband speed on Earth. But the further away the space probe gets, the slower its speed becomes. At a distance of 390 million kilometers, the maximum was 8.3 Mbit/s — still much higher than radio frequency communication, NASA reported.

“The main goal of the system was to prove that the data rate reduction is proportional to the square of the distance,” says project technician Abi Biswas. We achieved this goal and transmitted huge amounts of test data to and from the Psyche spacecraft via laser. In the first phase of the demonstration, approximately 11 terabytes of data were transferred.

NASA wants to reactivate the DSOC experiment in space soon

The DSOC experiment aboard “Psyche” is currently paused, but is scheduled to be activated again on November 4. “We'll turn on the flight laser transceiver and do a quick check of its functionality,” explains Ken Andrews, director of flight operations. “Once this is accomplished, we can look forward to operating the transceiver to its full capabilities.” (unpaid bill)