WASHINGTON - NASA’s Deep Space Optical Communications technology demonstration broke yet another record for laser communications this summer by sending a laser signal from Earth to NASA’s Psyche spacecraft about 290 million miles (460 million kilometers) away. That’s the same distance between our planet and Mars when the two planets are farthest apart, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory reports. Continue reading original article.
The Military & Aerospace Electronics take:
7 October 2024 -Managed by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's (NASA) Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), the Deep Space Optical Communications experiment comprises a flight laser transceiver and two ground stations. The California Institute of Technology’s (Caltech) 200-inch (5-meter) aperture Hale Telescope at Caltech’s Palomar Observatory in San Diego County, Calif., serves as the downlink station, receiving data from the laser transceiver in deep space. The Optical Communications Telescope Laboratory, located at JPL’s Table Mountain facility near Wrightwood, Calif., functions as the uplink station. It is capable of transmitting 7 kilowatts of laser power to send data to the transceiver.
“The milestone is significant. Laser communication requires a very high level of precision, and before we launched with Psyche, we didn’t know how much performance degradation we would see at our farthest distances,” said Meera Srinivasan, the project’s operations lead at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. “Now the techniques we use to track and point have been verified, confirming that optical communications can be a robust and transformative way to explore the solar system.”
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Jamie Whitney, Senior Editor
Military + Aerospace Electronics
