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The radio communication was beamed from NASA's Psyche spacecraft, which is currently moving towards the main asteroid belt between Jupiter and Mars Story highlights
NASA achieved a historic feat after its deep space communication technology aboard the Psyche spacecraft broke all records and showcased its capabilities in transmitting messages using lasers from deep space to Earth.
This success has now increased the possibility of future spacecraft utilising optical communications to enable more complex and faster data transmission.
NASA's Psyche spacecraft, which is currently moving towards the main asteroid belt between Jupiter and Mars, has been equipped with the Deep Space Optical Communications technology and was created by the scientists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California.
Although the primary communication system of the spacecraft is dependent on radio frequency, the demo of optical communications has shown that it is a potential game-changer in deep space communication.
The optical communications demo which took place on April 8 ended successfully as a copy of engineering data was transmitted from over 140 million miles (226 million kilometres) away, which is 1½ times the distance between Earth and the Sun.
Project's operations lead at JPL Meera Srinivasan said, "We downlinked about 10 minutes of duplicated spacecraft data during a pass on April 8. Until then, we'd been sending test and diagnostic data in our downlinks from Psyche."
"This represents a significant milestone for the project by showing how optical communications can interface with a spacecraft's radio frequency comms system," she added.
The laser communications technology used in this demo has been used for transmitting messages from deep space at a speed which is 10 to 100 times faster in comparison to the current state-of-the-art radio frequency systems which is used by deep space missions.
Watch: NASA restores contact with Voyager 1 after months of silence
The experiment was able to achieve a maximum data transmission rate of 267 megabits per second (Mbps) on December 11, 2023, from the near-infrared downlink laser of the light laser transceiver.
This was achieved when a 15-second ultra-high-definition video was beamed by the spacecraft to Earth from 19 million miles away.
The data transmission is likely to decrease as the spacecraft ventures farther away from Earth.
During the April 8 test, data was being transmitted by the spacecraft at a maximum rate of 25 Mbps, which is beyond the project's goal of transmitting at least 1 Mbps from that distance.
"After receiving the data from the DSN and Palomar, we verified the optically downlinked data at JPL. It was a small amount of data downlinked over a short time frame, but the fact we're doing this now has surpassed all of our expectations," said Ken Andrews, who is a project flight operations lead at JPL.
(With inputs from agencies)
Prisha is a digital journalist at WION and she majorly covers international politics. She loves to dive into features and explore different cultures and histories
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