When I heard this, I felt an amused twinge of envy. Last year I used a nondescript 4G broadband service and achieved 20 Mbps at best, NASA's Psyche mission STILL achieved 23 Mbps at a distance of 225 million kilometers! This is all thanks to the prototype optical transmission system used in the probe. This means it can achieve data transfer rates up to 100 times higher than conventional radio.
NASA's Pysche mission is on its way to explore the metal-rich asteroid between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, unsurprisingly called Psyche. What's fascinating about the asteroid is that it appears to be the iron-rich core of an unformed planet. The spacecraft had numerous scientific instruments to study the asteroid, including an imaging device, a gamma-ray and neutron spectrometer, a magnetometer and an X-band gravity platform.
It began its two-year journey on October 13 with its destination, a tiny world that could help us unlock some of the mysteries of how our solar system formed. The theory that Psyche is a failed planet core is not certain, so this will be one of the first mission objectives; Is it simply unmelted metal or was it a core? To understand this, one must determine his age. In addition to the origin, another goal is to explore the composition and its topography on the surface.
The asteroid Quest was discovered in March 1852 by the Italian astronomer Annibale de Gasparis. Because he discovered it, he was allowed to name it and chose Psyche after the Greek goddess of the soul. It orbits the sun at a distance of 378 to 497 million kilometers and takes about 5 Earth years to complete one orbit. It is shaped like a potato, or more precisely, it is called “irregular”. In fact, it is a small ellipsoid, 280 km wide at its widest point and 232 km long.
Illustration of the metallic asteroid Psyche. Photo credit: Peter Rubin/NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU
Perhaps more interesting than the targets was the test communications system (although I look forward to learning more about this wonderful asteroid). The newly developed Deep Space Optical Communications technology (DSOC) is not the primary communications platform, but is available as a prototype.
The optical system based on laser technology successfully sent back technical data over a distance of 226 million kilometers. Perhaps even more impressive, however, is that the spacecraft has demonstrated that it can transmit at a speed of 267 Mbit/s (YES, you read that right, just over a quarter of a Gbit/s!). The impressive download speed was achieved on December 11 last year when a 15-second ultra high-definition video was sent to Earth. Unfortunately, however, the spacecraft's data transmission capability will decrease as it retreats. However, still far better than normal radio communication.
Using a powerful modulated laser, the Optical Communication Telescope Laboratory in California will be able to send low-speed data to Psyche. To receive data, a photon counting receiver was installed at Caltech Palomar Observatory, which records the information sent by the spacecraft. Communication has always been a major challenge in space exploration, and although we cannot reduce the transmission time for data, we can increase the amount of data sent at the same time. A major advance in space exploration.
Source: NASA's Optical Comms Demo transmits data over 140 million miles
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