At some point in history, we’re going to be able to want to expand the World Wide Web across the galaxy, and NASA just proved an important and relevant piece of tech that might be really helpful, beaming messages via laser across a distance of close to 16 million kilometers or 10 million miles. The exam is part of NASA’s Deep Space Optical Communications (DSOC) experiment, and the successful establishment of the comms link is named as ‘first light’. Read on to get to know all details about it.
First time ever for optical communcations
That’s about 40 times farther than the Moon is from Earth, and it’s the first time that optical communications have been sent across such a interval. As it is commonly known, we use radio waves to talk to distant spacecraft – but higher frequencies of light, like near infrared, offer an increase in bandwidth and in consequence a huge boost in data speed.
If we’re going to eventually be able to send high-definition video messages to and from Mars without a relevant delay, then this is a step towards the tech we need. The exam is part of NASA’s Deep Space Optical Communications (DSOC) experiment, and the successful establishment of the comms link is named as ‘first light’.
Trudy Kortes, who is director of Technology Demonstrations at NASA Headquarters explains that getting first light is one of many critical DSOC milestones in the netx months, paving the way toward higher-data-rate communications able of sending scientific data, high-definition imagery, and streaming video in support of humanity’s next giant leap.
This tech is totally different: it has been adapted for it use
We all rely on likely tech built into optical fibers for our ground-based, high-speed communications, but here it’s been suitable for use through deep space to migliorate on existing ways of getting information back to Earth. It is interesting how we already have this methodology present in our current situation, but we are not aware of it.
Being infrared light, engineers can easily transmit its waves in laser form. This won’t get the light moving any way faster, but it does tidy and constrain its beam to a narrow channel. This requires far less power than a scatter of radio waves and is harder to intercept. This is a difference that needs to be underlined.
That doesn’t mean it’s a simple work. Data bits are encoded in the photons emitted by the laser, which implies a number of heavy duty instruments – including a superconducting high-efficiency detector array – to prepare the information for transmission, and translate it at the other end.
Another challenge is facing the system: adapt its configuration in real time
Another challenge is gwtting the system adapt its positioning configuration in real time. In this latest test, the laser photons took about 50 seconds to get from spacecraft to telescope, and both are hurtling through space at the same atime this is taking place.
The laser transceiver that made the connection is on board the Psyche spacecraft, which is on a two-year tech demo mission, headed for the asteroid belt amid Mars and Jupiter. It made contact with the Hale Telescope at the Palomar Observatory in California.
Psyche is planned for a fly-by around Mars, and so examsnwill keep to be carried out to refine and improve this new near-infrared laser communication method, and make sure it’s as fast and dependable as it needs to be.
“It was a formidable challenge, and we have a lot more work to do, but for a short time, we were able to transmit, receive, and decode some data,” says Meera Srinivasan, DSOC operations lead at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
