NASA succeeds with first deep space communication test

To be more clear: A good idea, if rather overhyped, in my opinion. All the NASA talk under discussion here makes no mention of the problems communicating with lasers through those cloudy and dusty planetary atmospheres whenever necessary and not whenever possible that I have pointed out in my own previous comment. Keep in mind that one unofficial, but real part of a Chief Scientist's job, is to be publically bullish on certain space missions and ideas. Such as the idea that people's destiny is to go in substantial numbers all the way not to die on Mars, one of the most interestingly horrible places to try very hard to survive day-to-day, is another annoyingly and, by now, apparently never-ending part of the abovementioned unofficial, but real hyping.

Rad Antonov

Glad to hear this worked. I first learned about the DSOC system on Psyche three years ago in a Clubhouse room from NASA’s then chief scientist Jim Green. There were also a number of NASA engineers on stage who went over some of the technical challenges. As the article says, this achievement is “Like using a laser pointer to track a moving dime from a mile away, aiming a laser beam over millions of miles requires extremely precise “pointing.” Psyche is 16 million kilometers away, unlike 20-30,000 km for satellites in orbit. Impressive!

Pointing lasers from the ground to spacecraft is done all the time to track them and find their trajectories. Case in point: the GPS-like positioning systems of the EU (GALILEO, the Russian (GLONASS) and the Chinese (Beidou) carry laser retroreflectors for the light to bounce off their satellites and right back to the ground stations that track them in this way. As to pointing the lasers, the orbits of these satellites are known well enough that, after a preliminary feedback-driven "hunting" for reflections, the laser is locked to the moving target. As to establishing reliable communications of ultra broad-band with laser connections between ground and spacecraft, not so much, because clouds get in the way, being opaque to laser light, and that is why a world-spanning network of radio telescopes is used for communications between ground and distant space probes to Mars, etc. as these are always made by radio. For example, NASA's Deep Space Network run by JPL. Or for Earth- orbiting satellites, using more modest radio installations of the same basic design. I have not followed this closely, so it could be that some infrared band might be seen through clouds, although I doubt it, based on some experience using data from passive radiometers to measure, from satellites, the precipitable water vapor in the columns of air below. And those use radio frequencies in the L and Ku bands. Meteorological satellites use infrared, but that is mainly to measure the cloud-top albedo. Where such broad-band lasers are expected to make a substantial improvement is in communications between spacecraft simultaneously in outer space and aligned to being "in line-of-sight of each other", even if millions of miles apart.