NASA mission beams cat video through space with lasers: ScienceAlert

Ships passing by at night used Morse code to communicate, which was sent using lanterns and shutters. The same basic principle has allowed NASA to communicate with Psyche, its mission to a metal-rich asteroid in the main belt.

However, the “light” was a version of heat, and instead of being able to see each other, Psyche is 240 million miles from Earth. Oh, and the upload rate of the data sent is still better than old dial-up Internet connections that were widely used not so long ago.

This feat was part of the culmination of the first phase of NASA’s Deep Space Optical Communications experiment. Psyche carries a laser transceiver tuned to a specific frequency of infrared light, which can also be transmitted and received by two ground stations stationed in California. The infrared frequency selected by the mission planner at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory is much higher than the typical high-frequency communications used for space missions. In this case, a higher frequency also means a higher data rate.

As part of its Phase I operations, the experiment transmitted data to and from Psyche at an astonishing 267 megabits per second, when the spacecraft was as far from Mars as the Red Planet was closest to us. This corresponds to a typical wired broadband connection here on Earth.

But it was made in space – with lasers.

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In June, Psyche reached a new milestone for distance from Earth – 390 million km. This corresponds to the greatest distance between Earth and Mars. During this window, operators managed to maintain a download link at 6.25 megabits per second.

While this is a few orders of magnitude slower than the maximum data rate achieved at a closer distance, it is still orders of magnitude higher than the same data rate of a high frequency link with the same power output.

As part of this Phase I test, what else would NASA send from its spacecraft other than a cat video – in this case, an ultra-high-definition video of a cat named Taters chasing a red laser pointer for 15 seconds. As a proof of concept for a high-speed communications line, most Internet users would agree that this is a good use of bandwidth.

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Ultimately, the last successful connection in June marked the end of the system’s initial testing phase. The project team clearly demonstrated that the reduction in communication data rate was, as expected, proportional to the inverse square of the distance between Earth and Psyche. In other words, as the distance between the spacecraft and the base station increases, the data rate decreases even faster.

A second phase of the experiment will begin in November when the laser transceiver is turned back on. At this point, it will be proven that the system can operate for more than a year, and finally the system will be brought into full operational mode later in 2024.

Psyche is scheduled to reach its target asteroid in 2029, giving the team enough time to prepare its system for operations before then. Psyche also has a backup radio frequency communications system in case the laser system fails – and even that is still faster than lanterns and shutters.

This article was originally published by Universe Today. Read the original article.