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347

Yeah, its a man-made space craft. Its an interesting tech-demo though.

Archive: https://archive.today/MRK5L

From the post: "Adeep space experiment traveling on NASA’s Psyche spacecraft has just beamed a message via laser to Earth from far beyond the Moon for the first time, an achievement that could transform how spacecraft communicate.

In the farthest-ever demonstration of this type of optical communication, the Deep Space Optical Communications (DSOC) beamed a near-infrared laser encoded with test data from its position around 16 million kilometers (10 million miles) away – which is around 40 times farther than the Moon is from Earth – to the Hale Telescope at Caltech’s Palomar Observatory in California.

The DSOC is a two-year tech demonstration riding along on Psyche as it makes its way to its prime target, asteroid Psyche. The demo achieved “first light” on November 14, according to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), which manages both missions, thanks to an incredibly precise maneuver that saw its laser transceiver lock onto JPL’s powerful uplink laser beacon at its Table Mountain Observatory, which allowed the DSOC’s transceiver to aim its downlink laser at Caltech’s observatory 130 kilometers (100 miles) away. "

Yeah, its a man-made space craft. Its an interesting tech-demo though. Archive: https://archive.today/MRK5L From the post: "Adeep space experiment traveling on NASA’s Psyche spacecraft has just beamed a message via laser to Earth from far beyond the Moon for the first time, an achievement that could transform how spacecraft communicate. In the farthest-ever demonstration of this type of optical communication, the Deep Space Optical Communications (DSOC) beamed a near-infrared laser encoded with test data from its position around 16 million kilometers (10 million miles) away – which is around 40 times farther than the Moon is from Earth – to the Hale Telescope at Caltech’s Palomar Observatory in California. The DSOC is a two-year tech demonstration riding along on Psyche as it makes its way to its prime target, asteroid Psyche. The demo achieved “first light” on November 14, according to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), which manages both missions, thanks to an incredibly precise maneuver that saw its laser transceiver lock onto JPL’s powerful uplink laser beacon at its Table Mountain Observatory, which allowed the DSOC’s transceiver to aim its downlink laser at Caltech’s observatory 130 kilometers (100 miles) away. "

(post is archived)

[–] 2 pts

No data rate?

[–] 1 pt

Given the current hardware (1 m ground transmit, 5 m ground receive, 22 cm spacecraft telescope), the uplink is expected to reach 292 kbit/s at a distance of 0.4 AU, with the downlink reaching 100 Mbit/s at the same distance.[7]

(((kikepedia))): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Space_Optical_Communications cited source (PDF warning): https://www.lpi.usra.edu/opag/july2014/posters/9-DSOC_OPAG_Poster.pdf

Nothing specific about the data rate achieved on this test, but that might come out later as papers are written on the experiment results.

[–] 1 pt

I didn't find one. Guess I'll have to poke around to find out. May have been pretty low since the beam would fan out without additional optics to retransmit or focus it.

[–] 2 pts

As mentioned, they will probably reveal it after their paper is done and published.