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Mahesh

25/11/23 12:22 PM IST

NASA’s Psyche mission fires lasers at Earth from 16 million kilometres away

In News
  • NASA’s Psyche spacecraft, currently over 16 million kilometres away in space, successfully fired a laser signal at Earth.
NASA’s Deep Space Optical Communications
  • NASA’s Deep Space Optical Communications (DSOC) experiment is riding aboard the Psyche spacecraft, which was launched recently.
  • DSOC will be used to send high-bandwidth test data to our planet as psyche travels to the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.
  • The transceiver is a high-tech instrument on Psyche that is capable of sending and receiving near-infrared signals.
  • It was able to aim its downlink laser back to Palomar, which is about 130 kilometres south of Table Mountain, with help from the uplink beacon.
  • Automated systems on the transceiver and ground station fine-tuned the pointing and receiving of the laser communication.
  • Optical communications have been demonstrated previously in low-Earth orbit and even to the Moon, but DSOC is the first test in deep space.
  • Using lasers to communicate with a spacecraft in deep space millions of kilometres away is many orders of magnitude more difficult than that, requiring very precise“pointing.”
  • At Psyche’s farthest distance from our planet, the near-infrared laser rays will take about 20 minutes to travel to our planet. In that time, both the spacecraft and the planet will have moved relative to each other.
  • This means that the uplink and downlink lasers will have to point to where the spacecraft and planet will be at that point in time, instead of where it is at the moment of transmission
Source- Indian Express

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