Laser message reaches Earth from nearly 10 million miles away in space
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NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California manages both DSOC and Psyche, which travels to the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter
Deep Space Optical Communications (DSOC), a laser space communication system, of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has achieved "first light" as it successfully transmitted data through laser over a distance of 10 million miles.
NASA said on Nov 16 that the experiment beamed data encoded within a near-infrared laser to the Hale Telescope at Caltech's Palomar Observatory in San Diego County, California.
The distance was about 40 times farther than the Moon is from Earth, as it became the farthest-ever demonstration of optical communications.
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DSOC is placed on the recently launched Psyche spacecraft. It is configured to send high-bandwidth data to Earth during its two-year technology demonstration. Psyche mission is travelling to the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter after being launched in October this year.
NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California manages, both DSOC and the Psyche mission.
The space agency said that the tech demo achieved "first light" in the early hours of Nov 14.
'Achieving first light is one of many critical DSOC milestones'
As quoted by NASA, Trudy Kortes, director of Technology Demonstrations at NASA Headquarters in Washington, said: "Achieving first light is one of many critical DSOC milestones in the coming months, paving the way toward higher-data-rate communications capable of sending scientific information, high-definition imagery, and streaming video in support of humanity's next giant leap: sending humans to Mars."
The US-based space agency said that the test data also was sent simultaneously via the uplink and downlink lasers — a procedure known as "closing the link" that is a primary objective for the experiment.
As quoted, Meera Srinivasan, operations lead for DSOC at JPL, said: "Tuesday morning’s test was the first to fully incorporate the ground assets and flight transceiver, requiring the DSOC and Psyche operations teams to work in tandem. 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."
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