NASA’s Pasadena, California-based Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) manages the Psyche spacecraft mission, which is traveling to the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. The mission will test a sophisticated new deep-space optical communications (DSOC) technology that encodes data in photons at near-infrared laser beams (rather than radio waves) to communicate between a probe in deep space and Earth.

In an experiment that could transform how spacecraft communicate, JPL managed to beam a test message from nearly 10 million miles away—about 40 times farther than the Moon is from Earth—from Psyche to the Hale Telescope at Caltech’s Palomar Observatory in San Diego County, California, the farthest-ever demonstration of optical communications.

The DSOC technology will allow data rates at least 10 times higher than current state-of-the-art radio telecommunications systems. It will continue to send high-bandwidth test data to Earth during the journey to the asteroids, which will be completed in 2028.

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