- NASA beamed a message from nearly 10 million miles.
- The technological feat, using NASA's Psyche probe, broke new ground for deep space communications.
- NASA hopes to one day send high-speed streaming to Mars.
NASA has achieved a world-first after sending a laser-beamed message to Earth from nearly 10 million miles away within 50 seconds.
While the space agency has long been able to communicate with spacecraft using radio waves, it had never before been able to send information using lasers from that far into space.
The feat, achieved using NASA's Deep Space Optical Communications (DSOC) experiment on board the Psyche spacecraft, could someday allow humans to stream video calls on Mars.
The system is capable of beaming information 10 to 100 times faster than current space communications equipment, per a press release published Thursday.
Bringing fiber optic tech to Mars
The probe homed into a powerful laser signal sent from the Jet Propulsion Lab's (JPL's) Table Mountain Facility near Wrightwood, California. This acted like a beacon to help Psyche aim its transmitter.
The spacecraft then beamed back information using its laser. The signals were received by the Hale Telescope in San Diego County, California, within around 50 seconds.
The probe was about 10 million miles away at the time (16 million kilometers). That's about 40 times the distance from the Earth to the moon.
"Achieving first light is a tremendous achievement. The ground systems successfully detected the deep space laser photons from DSOC's flight transceiver aboard Psyche," said Abi Biswas, project technologist for DSOC at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
"And we were also able to send some data, meaning we were able to exchange 'bits of light' from and to deep space.".
While getting a few bits from space may seem underwhelming, it is a crucial step that could revolutionize deep-space communications.
NASA and other space agencies are vying to bring humans back to the moon within the coming decade, a step toward their grander ambition to colonize Mars.
These explorers will need to be able to communicate with Earth effectively, and DSOC could help with that.
Optical communication is the same technology used in fiber optic internet. The light signal arrives just as fast as radio waves but can communicate a lot more information. This could offer high-bandwidth uploads and downloads.
"The primary objective is to give future NASA missions the tools for returning data at much higher rates," Biswas said in a video.
This first experiment is "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: sending humans to Mars," said Trudy Kortes, NASA director of Technology Demonstrations for the Space Technology Mission Directorate.
The system required some high-tech engineering, including developing a cryogenically-cooled superconducting detector that could spot a billion photons per second to squeeze every bit of information from the faint light traveling tens of millions of miles to Earth.
While the experiment proved the system could work, the team has many challenges ahead.
The technology is designed to work when Mars is as far away from the Earth as possible — that's about 235 million miles, or more than twice the distance between the sun and Earth.
At that distance, the light sent by Psyche will be much fainter. And at that distance, the photons will take about 20 minutes to arrive.
That's enough time for both the spacecraft and Earth to have moved, which means JPL scientists will need to make some careful calibrations to make sure the signal is detected as it arrives.
The team aims to test Psyche's DSOC system again as it whizzes past Mars on its way to its mission target: the asteroid belt between the red planet and Jupiter.