NASA’s space laser transmission strike earth from 140 million miles away
Washington: The Earth has received a mysterious signal from deep space approximately 140 million miles away, confirms NASA.
In October 2023, NASA launched a space mission, sending a spacecraft towards an asteroid, named ‘Psyche 16’, believed to be primarily composed of metal, a rarity in our solar system.
Psyche 16 is currently moving towards the main asteroid belt between Jupiter and Mars, has been equipped with the Deep Space Optical Communications technology and was created by the scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California.
Psyche was launched by NASA back in October last year. The device’s purpose was to send a laser beam from an extremely long distance through space in a device called the Deep Space Optical Communications (DSOC).
Project’s operations lead at JPL Meera Srinivasan said, “We downlinked about 10 minutes of duplicated spacecraft data during a pass on April 8. Until then, we’d been sending test and diagnostic data in our downlinks from Psyche.”
“This represents a significant milestone for the project by showing how optical communications can interface with a spacecraft’s radio frequency comms system,” she added.
NASA’s optical communications demonstration has proven it can transmit test data at a maximum rate of 267 Mbps from the near-infrared downlink laser of the light laser transceiver.
During the April 8 test, data was being transmitted by the spacecraft at a maximum rate of 25 Mbps, exceeding the project’s goal of transmitting at least 1 Mbps from that distance.
(With inputs from agencies)
