Georgina Torbet
By Georgina Torbet
February 8, 2024
When NASA’s Psyche mission launched in October of last year, it had a special passenger on board: a test of a new communications system using lasers, named Deep Space Optical Communications (DSOC). That system sent back its first data in November, and now it has hit another milestone, with signals from the experiment being received by a hybrid antenna on Earth.
The vast majority of deep space missions communicate using radio frequencies, which is a tried and tested technology that has been in use for decades. However, there are bandwidth limitations to radio communications, and as missions collect ever larger amounts of data, a new communications technology is required to send them. That’s where laser or optical communications come in, as this can improve the available bandwidth by 10 or even 100 times over the radio.
Read the whole story at: https://www.digitaltrends.com/space/nasa-hybrid-communications-antenna/