NASA
Members of DSOC staff react to the primary high-definition streaming video to be despatched through laser from deep house on Dec. 11, 2023.
The ASU-led Psyche mission has reached a milestone in testing a form of “space broadband.”
NASA’s Deep Space Optical Communications (DSOC) system can multiply information speeds 10- to 100-fold in comparison with present radio programs, which NASA has used for greater than half a century.
KJZZ has been following the mission.
For the primary time, a tightly packed practice of near-infrared laser pulses has delivered high-definition video to Earth from greater than 18 million miles away.
Appropriately, it confirmed a cat named Taters chasing a laser pointer.
But it’s not simply one other cat video: It’s additionally a name again to 1928, when RCA/NBC examined TV transmissions utilizing a statue of the cartoon character Felix the Cat.
NASA wants the brand new system, which is corresponding to high-speed web, to fulfill increasing mission calls for and to deal with high-def photographs and video from future missions to Mars.
NASA will proceed testing DSOC for practically two years.
In 2029, the robotic craft will attain, orbit and research its true goal: (16) Psyche, the place it can map the options, construction, composition and magnetic area of one among solely 9 identified iron-nickel asteroids within the photo voltaic system.
NASA/JPL-Caltech.
The Deep Space Optical Communications (DSOC) transceiver is inside a big tube-like sunshade and telescope on the Psyche spacecraft, right here inside a clear room at JPL. An earlier picture, inset, exhibits the DSOC earlier than it was built-in with the spacecraft.
