Nasa recieves signal from ten million miles away

 NASA receives signal from Ten million miles away spacecraft  

NASA has received a signal from a spacecraft 10 million miles away. The message, delivered using a distant laser, could “transform” communications with spacecraft. It represents a successful test of NASA’s Deep Space Optical Communications or DSOC experiment. It is also the first time that data has been successfully relayed through a laser from further away than the Moon – and marks a rapid increase, at more than 40 times the distance from the lunar surface. At the moment, almost all communications with craft in deep space is achieved through radio signals, sent and received from vast antennas on Earth. They have proven reliable but their bandwidth is limited, meaning that it is slow or impossible to send large files such as high-definition photos/videos.

NASA’s work on DSOC is an attempt to use optical communications through lasers instead. The technology could improve data rates by as much as 100 times. The first attempt to test the technology beyond the Moon left the Earth on NASA’s Psyche mission, which left Earth last month on a mission to study a distant asteroid. The spacecraft is carrying a laser transceiver which can send and receive laser signals in near-infrared. Last week, equipment locked onto a NASA laser beacon in California. NASA says that “first light” breakthrough is one part of a host of experiments and they are hopeful that the laser technology can work.

“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: sending humans to Mars,” said Trudy Kortes, director of technology demonstrations for the Space Technology Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters. NASA likes the precision pointing of the laser signal, to trying to point a light at a coin from a mile away. What’s more, the laser and its target are constantly moving: in the 20 minutes it will take for the light to travel to Earth from Psyche’s furthest distance, both the planet and the spacecraft would have moved significantly.

The team will now work to refine the systems which ensure that the spacecraft is pointing its lasers in the right direction. When that happens, NASA would try an experiment to demonstrate. To ensure that the spacecraft is able to maintain high-bandwidth data transfer at different distances from Earth into the space. It will do so by breaking the data into bits which can be encoded in the photons of light sent by the spacecraft. This light then arrives at the telescope on Earth and can be reassembled into images or other important data sent by spacecraft  or perhaps humans in the future of space study.