A team prepares NASA’s Psyche spacecraft for launch inside the Astrotech Space Operations Facility near the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida on December 8, 2022. Psyche will launch atop a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket from Launch Complex 39A at Kennedy. Credit: NASA/Ben Smegelsky’s Deep Space Optical Communications experiment also interfaced with the Psyche spacecraft’s communication system for the first time, transmitting engineering data to Earth.continues to break records.
“We downlinked about 10 minutes of duplicated spacecraft data during a pass on April 8,” said Meera Srinivasan, the project’s operations lead at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. “Until then, we’d been sending test and diagnostic data in our downlinks from Psyche. This represents a significant milestone for the project by showing how optical communications can interface with a spacecraft’s radio frequency comms system.
Now that the spacecraft is more than seven times farther away, the rate at which it can send and receive data is reduced, as expected. During the April 8 test, the spacecraft transmitted test data at a maximum rate of 25 Mbps, which far surpasses the project’s goal of proving at least 1 Mbps was possible at that distance.
This experiment relayed test data — as well as digital pet photographs — to Psyche and back again, a round trip of up to 280 million miles . It also downlinked large amounts of the tech demo’s own engineering data to study the characteristics of the optical communications link.
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