NASA gets mysterious signal from deep space, explains what it means

NASA, in October last year, launched a space mission to send a spacecraft towards the asteroid 'Psyche 16'.

'Psyche 16' is believed to be primarily composed of metal, a rarity in the solar system. It is said to be located in the asteroid belt between the planets Mars and Jupiter.

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The spacecraft 'Psyche' has been named after the asteroid it is trying to explore. The other mission this robotic explorer is on is to test laser communications between deep space and the Earth.

Equipped with the Deep Space Optical Communications (DSOC) system, the 'Psyche' aims to make laser communication possible across vast distances in space, promising much faster connections than current methods.

Although Psyche primarily uses radio frequency communication, its optical communications technology proved successful in transmitting information and engineering data directly from the spacecraft back to Earth.

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"This represents a significant milestone for the project by showing how optical communications can interface with a spacecraft's radio frequency comms system," Meera Srinivasan, the project's operations lead at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, said in a statement.

Srinivasan explained that NASA downlinked about 10 minutes of duplicated spacecraft data during a pass on April 8. 

She said the duplicated data was transmitted via laser communications. In contrast, the original Psyche data was sent to ground control using standard radio-frequency communications channels on NASA's Deep Space Network (DSN). 

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'The objective was to assess if laser communications could perform as effectively, if not better, than traditional methods," she added.

NASA's optical communications demonstration has proven it can transmit test data at a maximum rate of 267 Mbps using the flight laser transceiver's near-infrared downlink laser, which is similar to broadband internet speeds. 

However, because the spacecraft is now much farther away, the data transmission rate is lower.

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Published: 02 May 2024, 04:15 PM IST