NASA Receiving Signal From 10 million miles away

NASA receiving signals from 10 million miles away, but how? NASA has recently tested its Deep Space Optical Communications (DSOC) experiment. This experiment could revolutionise communication with spacecraft. The experiment was successful in relaying data through a laser from a distance greater than the Moon for the first time. This is a significant increase, at more than 40 times the distance from the lunar surface to Earth.

Currently, radio signals are used to communicate with spacecraft in deep space. However, their bandwidth is limited, making it difficult to send large files. These large files could include high-definition photos and videos. DSOC aims to use optical communications through lasers instead, which could improve data rates by as much as 100 times.

Psyche mission results in NASA receiving signal from 10 million miles

NASA’s Psyche mission, which left Earth last month on a mission to study a distant asteroid, carried a laser transceiver that can both send and receive laser signals in near-infrared. Last week, the equipment locked onto a NASA laser beacon in California, achieving a “first light” breakthrough. It was this mission that led to NASA receiving a signal from 10 million miles away.

NASA hopes that this is one of many critical DSOC milestones in the coming months and beyond.

This paves the way toward higher-data-rate communications capable of sending scientific information, high-definition imagery, and streaming video. These will be in support of humanity’s next giant leap: sending humans to Mars.

NASA likens the precision pointing of the laser signal to trying to point a light at a coin from a mile away. What’s more, the laser and its target are constantly moving.

NASA’s Psyche mission has successfully demonstrated the use of lasers to communicate with Earth from a distance of 16 million kilometres away. This is 40 times the distance between the Moon and Earth. At Psyche’s farthest distance from our planet, the near-infrared laser rays will take about 20 minutes to travel to our planet. During that time, both the spacecraft and the planet will have moved relative to each other.

Next up, making sure everything points the right way

The team will now work to refine the systems to make sure the spacecraft lasers look in the right direction. When that happens, NASA will conduct an experiment to demonstrate that the spacecraft is able to maintain high-bandwidth data transfer at different distances from Earth.

It will do this by breaking the data into bits that can be encoded in the photons sent by the spacecraft. Those bits then arrive at the telescope on Earth, where they are reassembled into images or other important data.