NASA Transmits Data Over 300 Million Miles by Laser
- Editor OGN Daily
- Oct 7
- 2 min read
The agency's Deep Space Optical Communications division just downlinked 15 terabits of data to Earth from twice as far away as Mars.
ScienceAlert notes that NASA currently uses antiquated radio transmission.
No wonder that Sean Meenehan, the DSOC Ground Software Lead says: “There are kind of bottlenecks now in just how much volume of data we can get down in a given amount of time from the transmitters that we have.” So, successfully communicating by laser over vast distances looks set to become a much needed upgrade and represents a huge breakthrough in space communications.
DSOC consists of a laser transceiver, which is mounted on the Psyche spacecraft (currently about 300 million miles from Earth), and two ground stations. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) Table Mountain Facility sends a laser beam to Psyche, which receives it and uses that signal to accurately beam its own laser to the second station, Caltech’s Palomar Observatory in San Diego County.
That would be an impressive result in its own right if everything involved in the process was stationary. But they are not. Both Psyche and Earth are moving through space at tremendous speeds, and they are so distant from each other that the laser signal - which travels at the speed of light - can take several minutes to reach its target. By using the precise pointing required from the ground and flight laser transmitters to close the communication link, teams at NASA proved that optical communications can be done to support future missions throughout the solar system.
“Future space missions will require astronauts to send high-resolution images and instrument data from the Moon and Mars back to Earth. Bolstering our capabilities of traditional radio frequency communications with the power and benefits of optical communications will allow NASA to meet these new requirements,” says NASA's Kevin Coggins.
