NASA has broken the record for the farthest laser communication ever sent! We sent a laser signal to our Psyche spacecraft about 290 million miles away.
— Bill Nelson (@SenBillNelson) October 4, 2024
Congrats, team. This extraordinary achievement will transform the way we explore the solar system. https://t.co/C8BjC4hOdy pic.twitter.com/JdPx0dT48S
This is pretty cool:
That’s the same distance between our planet and Mars when the two planets are farthest apart.
...“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.”
...By transporting data at rates up to 100 times higher than radio frequencies, lasers can enable the transmission of complex scientific information as well as high-definition imagery and video, which are needed to support humanity’s next giant leap when astronauts travel to Mars and beyond.
As for the spacecraft, Psyche remains healthy and stable, using ion propulsion to accelerate toward a metal-rich asteroid in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.
Ion thrusters are pretty cool, too.
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