When I heard this, I felt a funny twinge of envy. Over the last year, I've been using unimpressive 4G broadband service, getting only 20 Mbps at best, while NASA's Psyche mission got 23 Mbps even at a distance of 225 million km. It is being It's all thanks to the probe's prototype optical transmission system. This means you can get data transmission speeds up to 100 times faster than regular wireless.
NASA's Pysche mission is headed to explore a metal-rich asteroid between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, unsurprisingly called Psyche. What's interesting about this asteroid is that it appears to be the iron-rich core of an unformed planet. The spacecraft carried a wealth of scientific instruments for exploring asteroids, including an imaging rig, gamma-ray and neutron spectrometers, magnetometers, and an X-band gravity platform.
On October 13, a two-year journey began with a destination: a tiny world that may help solve some of the mysteries of the formation of the solar system. The theory that Psyche is a failed planetary core is uncertain, so this would be one of its first mission objectives. Was it just unmelted metal, or was it the core? To understand this, you need to calculate its age. The other objective, next to origins, is to investigate the composition and topography of the entire Earth's surface.
Asteroid Psyche was discovered in March 1852 by Italian astronomer Annibale de Gaspari. Having discovered it, he was allowed to name it and settled on Psyche, after the Greek goddess of the soul. It orbits the Sun at a distance of 378 million kilometers to 497 million kilometers, and takes about 5 Earth years to complete one revolution. Classified as potato-shaped, or perhaps more accurately “irregular,” this shape is actually a small oval, 280 km wide at its widest point and 232 km long.
Perhaps more interesting than the objective (although I myself am looking forward to learning more about this amazing asteroid) was the experimental communications system. The newly developed Deep Space Optical Communications Technology (DSOC) is not a major communications platform, but exists as a prototype.
Optical systems using laser technology have successfully transmitted engineering data 226 million kilometers away. Perhaps more impressively, the spacecraft showed that it can transmit at speeds of 267 Mbps (yes, you read that right, just over a quarter of 1 Gbps!) at this incredible download speed. was achieved on December 11th last year when a super-fast 15-second transmission took place. High resolution video was transmitted to Earth. But sadly, as the spacecraft moves away, its ability to transmit data decreases. Still, it's much better than regular wireless communication.
California's Optical Communications Telescope Laboratory will be able to transmit data to Psyche at low speeds using powerful modulated lasers. To receive the data, a photon-counting receiver was installed at Caltech's Palomar Observatory to receive information transmitted by the spacecraft. Communication is always a big challenge in space exploration, and while it is not possible to reduce the data transfer time, it is possible to increase the amount of data sent at one time. A huge step forward in space exploration.
Source: NASA optical communications demo transmits data over 140 million miles