NASA has sent a laser signal from its ground architecture to the Psyche spacecraft about 290 million miles away from Earth. The space agency said Thursday that the successful send marks a major step forward in its development of deep space optical communications.
For the demonstration conducted from June to July, NASA sent data to and from Psyche as bits on a near-infrared light, which can transport up to a hundred times higher data rates than radio frequencies.
According to the agency, the maximum data transmission rate achieved during the demonstration was 267 megabits per second, or almost comparable to broadband internet download speeds, when Psyche was only about 33 million miles away from Earth. When Psyche was about 240 million miles away, NASA recorded a sustained downlink data rate of 6.25 megabits per second.
The spacecraft was launched in October 2023 to study a metal-rich asteroid between Mars and Jupiter.
“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. “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.”
After the demonstration, NASA powered down Psyche’s flight laser transceiver to ensure that it could operate for at least a year. It will be powered back up on Nov. 4 for the post-conjunction phase.