This represented a significant advancement in long-distance communication. A laser transmission was successfully received by Earth from a record-breaking 140 million miles away, a feat that has significant ramifications for upcoming space exploration.
Hold onto your spacesuits, though! This was not a communication from extraterrestrial life. NASA’s Psyche spacecraft, which is presently traveling 1.5 times the distance between Earth and the Sun, is the source of the transmission.
“This represents a significant milestone,” Meera Srinivasan said, the project operations lead at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, “Significant for the project by showing how optical communications can interface with a spacecraft’s radio frequency comms system,”
Deep Space Optical Communications (DSOC), a crucial component of the Psyche probe, was involved in this discovery. Although the main objective of Psyche is to investigate the metallic giant 16 Psyche, which is thought to be worth $100 quadrillion, NASA saw a chance to test the feasibility of long-distance laser communication. Between 10 and 100 times faster than existing methods, this technology promises to transmit data much more quickly and richly, revolutionizing human-to-deep-space probe communication.
This accomplishment extends beyond delivering a laser message that breaks records. Additionally, Psyche was able to send real-time data from the spacecraft itself.
“We downlinked about 10 minutes of duplicated spacecraft data,” Srinivasan noted. “Until then, we’d been sending test and diagnostic data in our downlinks from Psyche.”
Psyche had previously relayed data from a distance of 10 million miles in November of the previous year, but that was test data that had been pre-loaded and not real-time information.
Psyche has been sending out messages ever since it launched on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket in October, and this particular transmission was the last of those messages. In a previous test conducted in December, Psyche transmitted data at a maximum rate of 267 megabits per second while beaming back data from 19 million miles away. It took just over a minute and a half for this data transfer, which included a video of a cat named Taters, to arrive on Earth—speeds that are on par with broadband internet!
Of course, with 140 million miles to travel, the most recent DSOC transmission could only manage 25 megabits per second. Still, this was more than the project’s original objective of “demonstrating a minimum data rate of 1 Mbps at that distance.”
This ground-breaking accomplishment provides a look at what lies ahead. According to NASA, “could use optical communications in support of humanity’s next giant leap: sending humans to Mars.”
Psyche is expected to pass close to Mars in 2026 before starting its main mission, which is to reach the riches of 16 Psyche by 2029. Psyche will map this celestial El Dorado, a metallic giant with enough precious metals to potentially upend the world gold market, much like the early explorers searching for the Northwest Passage.
