The laser message was transmitted by the space agency’s Deep Space Optical Communications (DSOC) experiment onboard the Psyche spacecraft.
NASA received a deep space laser message from its Psyche spacecraft from over 140 million miles (226 million kilometers) away. The laser message was transmitted by the space agency’s Deep Space Optical Communications (DSOC) experiment onboard the Psyche spacecraft.Psyche is on its way to a unique metal-rich asteroid, of the same name, orbiting the Sun between Mars and Jupiter. NASA is hopeful Psyche will be able to confirm the asteroid has an exposed nickel-iron core, a building block of planet formation. However, before it reaches the asteroid, the team back on Earth is testing out its DSOC experiment, which aims to demonstrate high-bandwidth communications in deep space for the first time.
“We downlinked about 10 minutes of duplicated spacecraft data during a pass on April 8,” remarked Meera Srinivasan, the project’s operations lead at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California.
