Eventually, we're going to want to expand the World Wide Web across the galaxy, and NASA just demonstrated a key piece of tech that could help, beaming messages via laser across a distance of almost 16 million kilometers or 10 million miles.
That's about 40 times farther than the Moon is from Earth,
and it's the first time that optical communications have been sent across such
a distance.
Traditionally, we use radio waves to talk to distant
spacecraft – but higher frequencies of light, such as near infrared, offer an
increase in bandwidth and therefore a huge boost in data speed.
If we're going to be able to send high-definition video messages
to and from Mars without a significant delay, then this is the tech we need.
The test is part of NASA's Deep Space Optical Communications
(DSOC) experiment, and the successful establishment of the comms link is known
as 'first light'.
"Achieving first light is one of many critical DSOC
milestones in the coming months, paving the way toward higher-data-rate
communications capable of sending scientific information, high-definition
imagery, and streaming video in support of humanity's next giant leap,"
says Trudy Kortes, who is director of Technology Demonstrations at NASA
Headquarters.
We all rely on similar tech built into optical fibers for
our ground-based, high-speed communications, but here it's been adapted for use
through deep space to improve on existing methods of getting information back
to Earth.
Being infrared light, engineers can easily transmit its
waves in laser form. This won't get the light moving any faster, but it does tidy
and constrain its beam to a narrow channel. This requires far less power than a
scatter of radio waves and is harder to intercept.
That doesn't mean it's a simple task. Data bits are encoded
in the photons emitted by the laser, which requires a number of heavy duty instruments
– including a superconducting high-efficiency detector array – to prepare the
information for transmission, and translate it at the other end.
Another challenge is having the system adapt its positioning
configuration in real time. In this latest test, the laser photons took about
50 seconds to get from spacecraft to telescope, and both are hurtling through
space while this is happening.
The laser transceiver that made the connection is on board
the Psyche spacecraft, which is on a two-year tech demo mission, headed for the
asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. It made contact with the Hale Telescope
at the Palomar Observatory in California.
Psyche is scheduled for a fly-by around Mars, and so tests
will continue to be carried out to refine and improve this innovative
near-infrared laser communication method, and make sure it's as fast and
dependable as it needs to be.
"It was a formidable challenge, and we have a lot more
work to do, but for a short time, we were able to transmit, receive, and decode
some data," says Meera Srinivasan, DSOC operations lead at the NASA Jet
Propulsion Laboratory.