NASA has been testing communications through infrared lasers for some time, and now it has achieved a feat never before achieved: send a message using optical communications over a distance of 16 million kilometers.
Thanks to the Deep Space Optical Communications (DSOC) experiment, the US space agency has taken the first step to achieve something crucial: be able to make video calls with Mars.
In this specific case, the Psyche spacecraft, which is on a mission to collect scientific data in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, has launched the laser at the Hale telescope, located in California (United States).
“It is one of many critical milestones for DSOC in the coming months, paving the way to higher data rate communications capable of sending scientific information, high-definition images and streaming video to support humanity’s next great leap: sending to Mars,” Trudy Kortes, director of Technology Demonstrations at NASA, celebrates in a statement.
5 content in Spanish from the new free NASA+ platform, that you cannot miss
This system achieves a major milestone in communications between Earth and space, since allows the transmission of information at a speed between 10 and 100 times higher than current systems.
To give you an idea, the distance that this laser has achieved, 16 million kilometers, It is approximately 40 times that between the Earth and the Moon. A laser that, on the other hand, carries high-value information.
“It has been a formidable challenge and we have much more work to do, but for a short time we were able to transmit, receive and decode some data,” Meera Srinivasan, DSOC operations leader, said in the same statement.
In this sense, the next step of the mission will be to refine the laser control systems so that bits – the smallest units of information that a computer is capable of processing – are encoded into laser photons or quantum particles of light.
The main difference of this system with that of electromagnetic waves is that long-distance infrared can package that data betterwith which ground stations receive more information with less space.
For now, the Psyche spacecraft will continue its mission with different technical checks, such as turning on the propulsion systems or studying the asteroid, which it will arrive in 2028.
Get to know how we work in NoticiasVE.
Tags: NASA, Telecommunications, astronomy