Late last year, NASA scientists pressed the start of a long-awaited space mission. In short, they launched a spacecraft towards an asteroid that could very well be made entirely of metal, a composition that appears to be a rarity – at least in the vicinity of our solar system. The robot adventurer is called Psyche and his namesake is the giant rock that accompanies his journey: 16 Psyche.
However, Psyche also has a side mission: laser communication.
On board Psyche, among the equipment for studying asteroids, is a technology demonstration called Deep Space Optical Communications, or DSOC. DSOC wants to show that it is possible laser communication to be carried out over cosmic distances, allowing a much faster, high-bandwidth connection between humans and the probes they send to the final frontier. To be precise: the intention is for communication speeds to be between 10 and 100 times faster than what we are currently working with. And remarkably, it looked like DSOC hit some milestones on April 8.
Not only did it transmit data to Earth from Psyche’s location at the time, some 140 million miles (225 million kilometers) away – a record distance greater than the gap between our planet and the sun – but it also managed to send information back. taken directly from the spacecraft. This means that the DSOC transceiver actually interfaced with Psyche’s radio transmitter and returned concrete technical data contained within the craft.
Related: NASA’s Psyche metal asteroid mission will have a major impact on astronomy. Here’s how
“We downlinked approximately 10 minutes of duplicated spacecraft data during a flyby on April 8,” said Meera Srinivasan, project operations lead at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California, in a statement. rack. It was “duplicated” data that was downlinked, because the “original” Psyche data, if you will, went to ground control via standard radio frequency communications channels on NASA’s Deep Space Network (DSN). Scientists just wanted to see if laser communication could work just as well, if not better.
Yet this feat of duplicate data is itself a major problem for the experiment; While DSOC has been making headlines for several other milestones lately, there is a caveat. In November last year, for example when it sent data back to Earth from a distance of 10 million miles, and recently during a “turnaround test” where scientists pinged the experiment with content and then had that content pinged back, DSOC did not beam back all the “real” information. It was pre-loaded test data that could be pulled out on command.
“We sent testing and diagnostic data into our downlinks from Psyche,” Srinivasan said. “This represents an important milestone for the project as it demonstrates how optical communications can interface with a spacecraft’s radio frequency communications system.”
And now if you’re wondering how the rate tests for DSOC go, we need to get to the cat video.
The cat video
Consider how all previous DSOC data was test information created by the team’s scientists. After all, scientists are only human.
Last December, DSOC hit a few other checkpoints as he was spun toward Psyche’s destination. First, it sent back data from a distance of 19 million miles (which doesn’t sound like much to me compared to today’s trip of 87 million miles, but that was huge at the time). Second, the information it sent back traveled at the system’s maximum speed of 267 megabits per second (Mbps), so it took about 101 seconds to reach each Earth. This, NASA explains, is equivalent to broadband internet download speeds.
And third, some of the data was stunning video from Taters. Who is Taters, you ask? Well, a sweet little orange tabby kitten of course. (It would be an orange cat, right?) This is probably also a good time to mention some of the recent “turnaround test” data that also involves pet photos.
However, during the April 8 test, DSOC did not achieve the maximum data transmission speeds as with Taters’ video. The message arrived at DSOC’s primary downlink ground station at Caltech’s Palomar Observatory in San Diego County, at a maximum speed of 25 Mbps, NASA writes in the statement — though it highlights how even that level exceeds the project’s goal of at least 1 Mbps at distance far exceeds. this kind of distance.
One problem that seems to have arisen for the team is the fact that in order for DSOC to work properly, it requires Mother Nature to cooperate. DSN communication, on the other hand, is not completely dependent on the weather. “We learned a lot about how far we can push the system when the weather is clear, although storms have occasionally interrupted operations on both Table Mountain and Palomar,” said Ryan Rogalin, head of the project’s receiver electronics at JPL. in the statement.
JPL’s Table Mountain facility is true DSOC’s Ground Laser Transmitter instrument is locatedAnd fascinatingly, NASA explains that the lab recently tried combining that instrument with DSN’s optical antenna and Palomar’s equipment to see if the same signal can be coordinated at the same time. The aim was to see if it is possible to switch between stations if an area experiences particularly bad weather, forcing some instruments to switch off.
Related stories:
– NASA’s asteroid mission Psyche will test next-generation laser communications in space
— NASA’s Psyche spacecraft just fired a laser 10 million miles into space
— Metal asteroid Psyche has a ridiculously high ‘value’. But what does that actually mean?
It will be interesting to see how everything plays out in the future with laser communications in deep space, and DSOC seems to indicate an optimistic outcome. A high-speed link between space explorers and the rest of humanity on Earth would mean clearer cosmic images, a smoother transition for our species as engineers focus on making moves on Mars and generally more advanced science.
As Ken Andrews, head of project flight operations at JPL, put it, “It was a small amount of data downlinked in a short time frame, but the fact that we are doing this now has exceeded all our expectations.”
I mean, at the very least, maybe someday laser communication will lead us to cute pictures of alien pets?