NASA succeeds with first deep space communication test (Patreon)

[This is a transcript with links to references.]

NASA has succeeded in a first test of its new deep-space communication technology, which you might one day use to check in on your son, who recently moved to Mars.

The test was conducted between a device abord the recently-launched Psyche mission and the Palomar Observatory in San Diego County, California. The Psyche spacecraft is on a journey to the asteroid belt between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. Currently, it’s about ten million miles away from Earth, that’s a bit more than 40 times the distance between our planet and the Moon.

The system that NASA uses works not with two, but three different stations. One is a beacon from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, that goes out to the spacecraft. This sends commands and location information. The communication itself is then sent back from the spacecraft with a laser in the near infrared to the Palomar Observatory. The brief connection between the Psyche spacecraft and the observatory worked as desired. They successfully transmitted, received, and decoded some test data.

With this system, NASA is aiming at a bandwidth of 1 point 2 Megabit per second, which is more than you get 10 kilometres down the road from us. And they’ll probably have fibre optics cables on Mars before we get them here.

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