NASA announced that Earth just received a laser message from 140 million miles away, Space.com reported.
Psyche Spacecraft sends laser message from 140 million miles away, setting the stage for future Mars missions
The laser message was sent by NASA’s Psyche spacecraft, which is currently 140 million miles from Earth, about 1.5 times the distance between Earth and the Sun. NASA suggests that this impressive achievement could open the door for future missions to Mars.
“This achievement provides a glimpse into how spacecraft could use optical communications in the future, enabling higher-data-rate communications of complex scientific information as well as high-definition imagery and video in support of humanity’s next giant leap: sending humans to Mars,” the space agency explained.
NASA aimed to demonstrate that laser communications could work over vast distances in space, providing high bandwidth and much faster connections—10 to 100 times faster than what’s currently available—between people and the spacecraft they send into the cosmos.
Along with sending the laser signal over a record-setting distance, NASA successfully transmitted real data from the spacecraft.
The laser message was sent to Earth by NASA’s Deep Space Optical Communications transceiver, which is currently onboard the Psyche spacecraft. The transceiver communicates by transmitting and receiving data through an 8.6-inch aperture telescope.
NASA achieves successful data downlink from psyche spacecraft at varying distances
“We downlinked about 10 minutes of duplicated spacecraft data,” explained Srinivasan. “Until then, we’d been sending test and diagnostic data in our downlinks from Psyche.”
The experiment began in December 2023, when Psyche was about 19 million miles from Earth. In that first test, data was transmitted at a speed of 267 megabits per second—about the same as fast broadband internet.
Now that Psyche is over seven times farther away, the data transfer speed has decreased. During the latest test, data was sent at a rate of 25 megabits per second. Though this might seem slow, NASA notes that it greatly exceeds the project’s goal of achieving at least one megabit per second at that distance.
In the past, NASA relied on radio waves to communicate with missions that travel beyond Earth. But now, as NASA puts it, “Much like fiber optics replacing old telephone lines on Earth as demand for data grows, going from radio communications to optical communications will allow increased data rates throughout the solar system.”
This upgrade will greatly improve communication for future human and robotic exploration missions and will also support higher-resolution scientific instruments.
