Speedy Downloads: Why NASA Is Turning To Lasers For Next-Gen Space Comms

The first tests of optical communications far from Earth will take place aboard the asteroid-bound Psyche spacecraft

Workers at a facility near Florida’s Kennedy Space Center attend to NASA’s Psyche spacecraft in late 2022.
(Credit:CREDIT: NASA / BEN SMEGELSKY) Workers at a facility near Florida’s Kennedy Space Center attend to NASA’s Psyche spacecraft in late 2022. The asteroid-bound craft, which launched October 13, 2023, carries a laser communications package (silver cylinder topped with gold) that will test the power of optical wavelengths to send data back to Earth from beyond the Moon.

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NASA’s recently launched asteroid hunter, Psyche, is designed to give us a look at a body that could resemble depths far within the Earth, where we can never go. But one instrument tagging along for a ride is exciting scientists who specialize in a completely different field — that of space communications. Since the dawn of the Space Age, they have depended on radio waves, just a sliver of the electromagnetic spectrum. But scientists hope to soon expand into another part of the spectrum. Their aim is to add lasers to our cosmic communications toolkit.

The Psyche spacecraft’s main mission is to explore a 144-mile-long, potato-shaped asteroid with an orbit roughly three times farther from the Sun than Earth’s. A leading theory holds that the target asteroid, also named Psyche (16 Psyche, to be exact), is the metal core of a once hopeful planet whose rocky surface was stripped away by hit-and-run collisions in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.

If so, getting a whiff of its unique mix of iron, nickel and rock may be the closest we will ever come to investigating the metal core of Earth.


Read More: NASA’s Psyche Mission to a Metal World May Reveal the Mysteries of Earth’s Interior

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