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Ships passing in the night used Morse code sent with lanterns and shutters to communicate. That same basic principle has allowed NASA to communicate with Psyche, its mission to a metal-rich
This feat was part of the culmination of the first Phase of NASA's Deep Space Optical Communications experiment. Psyche is carrying a laser transceiver tuned to a specific frequency of infrared light, which can also be transmitted and received by two ground stations based in California. The infrared frequency the mission planner at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory selected is much higher than the typical radio frequency communications used for deep space missions.
While that's a few orders of magnitude slower than the maximum data rate it reached the closer distance, it is still orders of magnitude above the same data rate of a radio frequency connection with the same power output. Ultimately, the latest successful connection in June was the end of the first Phase of testing for the system. The project team unequivocally proved that, as expected, communication data-rate reduction was proportional to the inverse square of the distance between Earth and Psyche. In other words, the data rate decreases even faster as the distance increases between the spacecraft and the base station.
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