NASA's Psyche Mission: Mysterious Laser Transmission Detected From 140 Million Miles Away, Here's All About It

NASA has announced the reception of a mysterious signal from its spacecraft "Psyche," which originated about 140 million miles away in space as per a report by NDTV.

Launched in October 2023, Psyche is on a mission to explore the asteroid "Psyche 16," which is believed to be composed mainly of metal, a rarity in our solar system.

The spacecraft is equipped with the Deep Space Optical Communications (DSOC) system, designed to enable laser communication over long distances in space, offering significantly faster connections than current methods.

While Psyche primarily uses radio frequency communication, the DSOC system has demonstrated its capability by successfully transmitting engineering data from over 140 million miles away, which is 1.5 times the distance between Earth and the Sun.

The DSOC system also successfully interfaced with Psyche's radio transmitter, enabling the transmission of information and engineering data directly from the spacecraft back to Earth.

Meera Srinivasan, the project's operations lead at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California, explained that they downlinked about 10 minutes of duplicated spacecraft data during a pass on 8 April.

This duplicated data was transmitted via laser communications, while the original Psyche data was sent to ground control using standard radio-frequency communications channels on NASA's Deep Space Network (DSN). The objective was to assess if laser communications could perform as effectively, if not better, than traditional methods.

NASA's optical communications demonstration has proven that it can transmit test data at a maximum rate of 267 Mbps using the flight laser transceiver's near-infrared downlink laser, similar to broadband internet speeds. However, the data transmission rate is currently lower due to the spacecraft's increased distance.

During a test on 8 April, the spacecraft successfully transmitted test data at a maximum rate of 25 Mbps, exceeding the project's goal of proving at least 1 Mbps was achievable at that distance.

Psyche is reportedly stable and healthy as it continues its journey toward the Psyche 16 asteroid between Mars and Jupiter.