
Fast communications could speed up science on the asteroid mission. A NASA laser just fired successfully in a deep-space test.
On Nov. 14, NASA picked up a laser signal fired from an instrument that launched with the Psyche spacecraft, which is currently more than 10 million miles (16 million kilometers) from Earth and heading toward a mysterious metal asteroid. (The spacecraft is at more than 40 times the average distance of Earth's moon, and still voyaging afar.)
The moment marked the first successful test of NASA's Deep Space Optical Communications (DSOC) system, a next-generation comms link that sends information not by radio waves but instead by laser light. It's part of a series of tests NASA is doing to speed up communications in deep space, on different missions.
"Achieving first light is a tremendous achievement. The ground systems successfully detected the deep space laser photons from DSOC. And we were also able to send some data, meaning we were able to exchange 'bits of light' from and to deep space," said Abi Biswas, the system's project technologist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California.
This DSOC test began in California, at JPL's Table Mountain Facility. There, in the hills outside Los Angeles, engineers switched on an uplink beacon, a near-infrared laser pointed in Psyche's direction. About 50 seconds later, a transceiver on Psyche received the laser and relayed its own laser signal back to Palomar Observatory, near San Diego.
Because laser light has shorter wavelengths than radio waves, using optical light would allow space missions to send 10 to 100 times more information per unit time than they currently do. Engineers will continue to test the system as Psyche voyages to its namesake asteroid, which resides in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. Psyche should get there in 2029, then spend 29 months surveying the bizarre metallic world.
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