A groundbreaking achievement for NASA as a spacecraft successfully transmitted a near-infrared laser signal over a distance of nearly 10 million miles into space. This remarkable feat was accomplished by NASA’s Psyche spacecraft, which beamed the laser, encoded with test data, into space. The transmitted laser signal was then directed back to Earth, specifically to the Hale Telescope at Caltech’s Palomar Observatory in San Diego County, California. This marks a significant advancement in the agency’s capabilities and opens up new possibilities for communication and data transmission in space exploration.
The test data was transmitted about 40 times farther than the distance between the moon and the earth, which NASA says is about 238,900 miles. The SpaceX Starship, for context, traveled around 93 miles into space last week. A groundbreaking achievement
In a historic achievement, NASA accomplished a “first light” event with a successful laser transmission on November 14. The milestone was reached when the laser transceiver on NASA’s Psyche spacecraft, equipped for sending and receiving near-infrared signals, synchronized with a powerful uplink laser sent from a telescope at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) near Wrightwood in California. This uplink laser facilitated the precise aiming of Psyche’s downlink laser back to Caltech’s Palomar Observatory. Automated systems on both the transceiver and ground stations fine-tuned the pointing, marking a crucial step forward in enhancing the capacity for data transmission throughout the solar system, according to NASA.