staff@slashgear.com (Nadeem Sarwar)
2024-05-02 10:53:57
www.slashgear.com
The LLCD success was a key milestone, but more than fast transmission, it demonstrated another technical victory. Compared to a similar radio communication system, the laser communication equipment was only half as heavy and required much less power, using only about 75% as much energy. This was followed by NASA’s Laser Communications Relay Demonstration (LCRD) in 2021, which is the agency’s first end-to-end laser communications relay system that is capable of transmitting data at a rate of 1.2 gigabits per second.
Meanwhile, in 2022, researchers detailed a special kind of laser made using the enigmatic Bose-Einstein Condensate (BEC), a unique state of matter, that takes advantage of atomic motion acting as waves. The system is essentially a matter-based laser that will theoretically last forever. A year later, NASA’s LCRD achieved its first data exchange link with the ILLUMA-T (Integrated LCRD Low Earth Orbit User Modem and Amplifier Terminal) system on the space station. The data exchange pace between the two now stands at over 1 Gbps.
The same year, the 25-pound TeraByte InfraRed Delivery (TBIRD) payload — which is part of NASA’s Pathfinder Technology Demonstrator program — demonstrated transmission rates close to 100 gigabits per second from the orbit. In April of 2024, the Deep Space Optical Communications (DSOC) kit on the asteroid-bound Psyche spacecraft successfully sent data packets from roughly 140 million miles away at a rate of about 25 Mbps.
That number might sound small, but it’s still “10 to 100 times faster than the state-of-the-art radio frequency systems used by deep space missions today,” according to NASA. When the Psyche spacecraft is at its maximum distance from Earth, it will take around 20 minutes for the laser communication system’s signals to make the journey back to our planet.