NASA’s latest mission has unveiled a captivating discovery: a signal is received from an unknown source in deep space. The audio signal, which travelled 140 million miles from the probe’s radio, was transmitted by NASA’s spacecraft Psyche 16.
The Spacecraft, whose primary function was to examine a small metallic asteroid named Psyche 16, launched on October 2nd, 2023. However, the same project contributes to the delivery of a secondary effort aimed at laser communication testing.
Deep Space Optical Communications (DSOC) system was integrated into the spacecraft by the aut and the collected data confirmed the laser communication utility as a means for interstellar distances. An extremely reliable Direct-to-Earth (DSOC) system was in use at this time;
it successfully interfaced with the spacecraft’s radio frequency transmitter, allowing the data transmission in a place far away from the Earth and surrounded by space the equivalent distance of 1.5 times as long as the distance between the Earth and the Sun.
Recently, the no-fail system of DSOC transmitted twice the data of spacecraft to receive it using laser communication, but the original data is transmitted using radio frequency to ground control.
Our study was designed to investigate the usefulness of laser communication as an alternative to the current methods.
The optical communications flight demonstration test achieved a data transmission rate of 25 Mbps which exceeded the objective of achieving a minimum of 1 Mbps such a great distance off it.
However, Psyche proved to be fairly solid and whole as she went forward, and soon, she could reveal many more cosmic charms.
