NASA received a laser message sent from a whopping distance of 226 million kilometers

NASA’s Psyche mission is on its way to study a peculiar asteroid, and during its mission the team has been testing a new communications system.

According to IFL Science, the new approach does not use radio waves, but rather a infrared laser and has now demonstrated that it works successfully from the furthest location to date.

A Psyche was 226 million kilometers from Earth when the message was sent — that’s 1.5 times the distance between the Earth and the Sun.

Psyche was transmitting its engineering data via radio waves through the Deep Space Network from NASA.

The mission team also decided to transmit data via the deep space optical communication system for the first time.

Previous transmissions were not spacecraft data, but test data.

O test April 8th showed that even at this distance, data could be downloaded at a maximum speed of 25 Mbps.

This value already far exceeds the expected objective of “at least 1 Mbps” and is 10 to 100 times faster than radio transmissions.

Meera Srinivasanresponsible for project operations at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), said that “we transferred about 10 minutes of duplicate data from the spacecraft during a pass on April 8.”

In previous tests, the spacecraft was much closer — just tens of millions of kilometers away. Images and even a video of a cat have been sent from deep space.

A technology continues to show promisebut there are still some problems that need to be resolved.

For example, optical observations are impeded by clouds. Radio communications do not suffer from this problem.

“We learned a lot about how far we can go with the system when we have clear skies, although storms have disrupted operations in Table Mountain It is Palomar on some occasions,” he said. Tyan Rogalinresponsible for the project receiver electronics at JPL.

The team will test the system again in Junewhen Psyche is at a distance 2.5 times greater than the distance from Earth to the Sun.

This is the maximum distance between Mars and Earth, and if the approach works, it is possible create a data-intensive network between Earth and Mars.