The launch today of NASA’s Psyche mission to visit a metal asteroid will include an extra bonus, as the spacecraft will carry a test of a new communications system.
Testing Space Lasers for Deep Space Optical Communications The Deep Space Optical Communications experiment will test out a laser-based communications system that could help NASA transmit more information from deep space missions, such as future missions to Mars.
Recommended Videos It isn’t possible to make communications any faster, as signals travel at the speed of light which is a hard limit — so, for example, the communications delay of up to 20 minutes between Earth and Mars isn’t something that we’ll be able to fix any time soon. But there is another way to improve the existing network, which is to increase its bandwidth.
That’s the idea for NASA’s ongoing upgrades to its Deep Space Network, which involve retrofitting the existing communications dishes here on Earth, which were designed for radio communications, to be able to handle laser communications as well. Compared to radio communications, laser systems can carry up to ten times as much data.
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