Nasa Laser Sends Terabits From Beyond Mars In Huge Success For Deep-Space Communications Test

Nasa Laser Sends Terabits From Beyond Mars In Huge Success For Deep-Space Communications Test

Nasa Laser Sends Terabits From Beyond Mars In Huge Success For Deep-Space Communications Test Infrared photo of the Table Mountain DSCO machinery in action – Credit NASA/JPL-Caltech NASA recently achieved an incredible milestone in an even more incredible quest: providing broadband to the solar system. But speaking specifically, the organization’s Deep Space Optical Communications (DSOC) division just downlinked 15 terabits of data from the Psyche Mission about 300 million miles from Earth via laser beam. That’s over three times the distance between the Earth and the Sun, and it represents a huge breakthrough in outer space communications that will be absolutely necessary in the future, and pretty much necessary now. “There are kind of bottlenecks now in just how much volume of data we can get down in a given amount of time from the transmitters that we have,” said Sean Meenehan, the DSOC Ground Software Lead, referring to existing technology of using radio waves. Aside from the brilliant s…