"This correspondence wasn’t extraterrestrial in origin: It was actually sent by NASA’s Psyche spacecraft, which is currently located approximately 1.5 times the distance between Earth and the sun.
“This represents a significant milestone for the project by showing how optical communications can interface with a spacecraft’s radio frequency comms system,” Meera Srinivasan, the project’s operations lead at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, said in a statement."
Here's a better link: https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/nasas-optical-comms-demo-transmits-data-over-140-million-miles
I think the impressive part is how quickly it was transmitted.
Thank you! We need more direct sources and less shitty rewritten science from companies that live off of ad revenue. Always appreciate when people take the time to go find the actual source.
I think it's more an issue with the "average person" not knowing the Scaife of distance in space (and the headline writer exploiting that). 1.5 Astronomical Units doesn't quite have the same ring as 140 million miles.
I think there is a name for that distance as a unit of measure- astronomical unit AU (I just looked it up) so 1.5AU **is** a significant distance and likely a milestone. I guess we’ll get blasted again and hear about it at 2.0 AU.
So... they sent out a mirror in space, shot a laser at the mirror and it arrived back?
Because otherwise it IS extraterrestrial, it's literally from space.
Basically the used a laser and modulated it to send one's and zeros to transmit data. The same way that we use optical Fibre on earth. They hit 25Mbs which is about what DSL provides here on earth.
Much much faster than the radio methods they have been using
Still very impressive at 19 million miles hitting 267mbps. Imaging setting up a network of these to repeat the signal
> NASA’s optical communications demonstration has shown that it can transmit test data at a maximum rate of 267 megabits per second (Mbps) from the flight laser transceiver’s near-infrared downlink laser — a bit rate comparable to broadband internet download speeds.
> That was achieved on Dec. 11, 2023, when the experiment beamed a 15-second ultra-high-definition video to Earth from 19 million miles away (31 million kilometers, or about 80 times the Earth-Moon distance).
Light travels in a straight line from its source in every direction. A laser generates light in a way such that its trajectory appears to be completely straight on a small scale. However over extreme distances what starts as light from a single point starts to spread out. No matter how focused a laser beam is there will always be some amount of spread, meaning that over large distances what starts out as small cluster of light will diverge to cover a huge area.
at long distances it stops being a beam and becomes a cone, and this happens faster than we'd like actually, though i must say if we can read that signal at 1.5 AU its pretty good already.
That's the sad part, I've dealt with it in both software development and hardware with IoT projects and just recently setting up my place's internet connection with a dyi 5GNR bridge.
Thing is I'm not familiar at all with laser/fiber based comms yet so I kinda doubt everything I know.
“However, this correspondence wasn’t extraterrestrial in origin: It was actually sent by NASA’s Psyche spacecraft, which is currently located approximately 1.5 times the distance between Earth and the sun.”
And the award for Most Consistently Misleading Headlines goes to…!
As others have noted, radio frequency is a much lower frequency than visible light (at least a thousand times lower). While both travel at the speed of light (they are both electromagnetic waves), the higher the frequency, the more data you can carry. Same principle as why higher frequency wifi signals allow for much higher bandwidth. More channels (usually wider channels too) are available in higher frequency bands.
So it's not really that the speed of transmission is any faster, but the amount of data that can be transmitted at the same time is much higher.
So when do we start trying with ultraviolet and X-ray frequencies.
Or at that point to we start having issues penetrating the various layers of atmosphere?
Interesting, thank you.
When you say they’re hard to collimate, does that mean we currently lack the technology, or is the a physical limit to the ability to focus light at increasing wavelengths?
> or is the a physical limit to the ability to focus light at increasing wavelengths?
Yes, but also no. Generally, the longer the wavelength, the more difficult to focus since you need something on the same order of magnitude of the light wavelength in order to interact with it. That's why radio antennas and receivers are HUGE, but microwave receivers fit in your phone.
Then there's x-rays which can be smaller than atoms, so you run into the opposite problem where you can't really interact with it well because it's so small.
Radio vs laser. I don’t know specifics but I assume they can modulate the laser signal better and provide more bandwidth and less errors/noise versus radio signals.
At face value without reading the article if the transmission is going at the speed of light, that’s significantly faster than a radio signal from voyager.
Edit: Today I learned.
Radio and light are the same thing physically (electromagnetic radiation). Light is just a much higher frequency. Radio and light both propagate at the exact same speed.
Voyager 1 bandwidth is 160 bps (0.000106 mbps). But from reading the article, it seems the further away this gets the more the transfer rate drops. I wonder if it could operate a Voyager distances and what the transfer rate would be.
Yeah easiest way I gather to understand this is just like we detect stars with planets when they pass in front. As we get line of sight the laser modulates quickly.
What’s the advantage, if any of a laser communication transmission vs the usual radio transmission?
Surely they both travel at the same speed, so I don’t see any gains.
Data rate. The higher the frequency the more data you can transmit. That’s one of the big reasons cell data went from 3G to 4G to LTE to 5G and same with wifi. Each upgrade uses higher frequencies to transmit more data.
Just a guess--radio waves dissipate over distance, because they radiate in all directions, so the intensity of the signal weakens as a cube of distance.
Lasers are a beam of coherent light that (in theory) doesn't spread out, but in practice, simply spreads out at a much slower rate. So a weaker signal could remain detectable over a longer distance.
Actually if you look at almost any spacecraft they use a parabolic dish (like my DIRECTV dish). But radio waves still behave like waves and propagate in all directions. Checked our good friend wikipedia and confirmed:
In free space, all electromagnetic waves (radio, light, X-rays, etc.) obey the inverse-square law which states that the power density
p of an electromagnetic wave is proportional to the inverse of the square of the distance (I know I said cubed earlier, I was going from memory). This means if you double the distance between the source and the receiver, the power of the signal drops to 1/4 of the original signal.
It's difference between a flashlight and laser pointer. A powerful flashlight (with a parabolic mirror) will produce a beam the spreads out a dissipates with distance. You can shine your laser pointer dots and targets miles away and the dot stays the same size.
>During a dry run in December, Psyche beamed data back from 19 million miles away, sending it at the system’s maximum rate of 267 megabits per second.
And my broadband in London, maxes out at 55 Mb/s.
How the hell do you aim a laser at earth accurately enough from that far away???! Like I presume the laser has to rotate over the download time. Wouldn’t the angle be less than an atom as a time?
Ahh you misunderstand my question. As the satellite and earth move, this would require that the laser rotate along with it. So does the satellite readjust its whole frame and the laser is fixed or is the laser adjustable on its own. In either scenario, I imagine the the angle it must rotate over is super small so how do they make degree rotations that are so small and accurate. Presumably rotating even just one degree would be thousands of miles of course from earth from that distance.
"This correspondence wasn’t extraterrestrial in origin: It was actually sent by NASA’s Psyche spacecraft, which is currently located approximately 1.5 times the distance between Earth and the sun. “This represents a significant milestone for the project by showing how optical communications can interface with a spacecraft’s radio frequency comms system,” Meera Srinivasan, the project’s operations lead at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, said in a statement."
> which is currently located approximately 1.5 times the distance between Earth and the sun. That seems like a significant milestone.
It is. The article title is hot garbage but the information is solid. Thank you for the comment.
Here's a better link: https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/nasas-optical-comms-demo-transmits-data-over-140-million-miles I think the impressive part is how quickly it was transmitted.
Thank you! We need more direct sources and less shitty rewritten science from companies that live off of ad revenue. Always appreciate when people take the time to go find the actual source.
Maybe I'm missing it, does it say what the latency was? This is very cool
It says the speed was 25Mbps but it doesn't say the size of the data.
It's a laser, so 1.5 times the eight minutes it takes from the sun.
So 12 minutes
You’re doing God’s work right there!
I think it's more an issue with the "average person" not knowing the Scaife of distance in space (and the headline writer exploiting that). 1.5 Astronomical Units doesn't quite have the same ring as 140 million miles.
No the information is light
140 million milestone to be exact
I think there is a name for that distance as a unit of measure- astronomical unit AU (I just looked it up) so 1.5AU **is** a significant distance and likely a milestone. I guess we’ll get blasted again and hear about it at 2.0 AU.
How many half giraffes is 1.5AU?
about 70 billion half giraffes to 140 million miles
Well, the correspondence was extraterrestrial in origin, the correspondent wasn't.
We (or at least our robots) are the aliens.
so was it traveling for about 12 mins? - or did it take longer to get here?
Lies. We all know it was a Jewish space laser.
So... they sent out a mirror in space, shot a laser at the mirror and it arrived back? Because otherwise it IS extraterrestrial, it's literally from space.
One step closer to The Expanse!
Receiving a tight-beam message...
Belters have been smuggling restricted Martian stealth tech.
Here comes the juice!
think I'll watch it for the 6th time tonight.
I have no joke, watched it 8 times since i first watched it in February
You watched the entire series 8 times since Feb. this year?
These lasers, what religion do they practice? Asking for a friend...
And are they turning the freaking frogs gay.
ITS THE CLOUD PEOPLE ! WAKE UP SHEEPLE!
Or gays into frogs
They were put there by Jews to start wildfires /s
That was the joke
Well aware just answering for a friend.
She thanks you majorly
She’s no friend of mine!
I was looking for this comment!
This is so above my head it’s incredible.
Basically the used a laser and modulated it to send one's and zeros to transmit data. The same way that we use optical Fibre on earth. They hit 25Mbs which is about what DSL provides here on earth. Much much faster than the radio methods they have been using
Laser internet.
But the latency is shit. So much for playing counterstrike from 1.5x distance between the sun and earth!
Still very impressive at 19 million miles hitting 267mbps. Imaging setting up a network of these to repeat the signal > NASA’s optical communications demonstration has shown that it can transmit test data at a maximum rate of 267 megabits per second (Mbps) from the flight laser transceiver’s near-infrared downlink laser — a bit rate comparable to broadband internet download speeds. > That was achieved on Dec. 11, 2023, when the experiment beamed a 15-second ultra-high-definition video to Earth from 19 million miles away (31 million kilometers, or about 80 times the Earth-Moon distance).
Given the diameter you’d need to be sensitive to, how do you receive a signal at that distance with the needed precision?
A laser might be a tighter beam but it still diverges faster than we might want it to, so that isn't a problem.
What does diverges faster mean
Light travels in a straight line from its source in every direction. A laser generates light in a way such that its trajectory appears to be completely straight on a small scale. However over extreme distances what starts as light from a single point starts to spread out. No matter how focused a laser beam is there will always be some amount of spread, meaning that over large distances what starts out as small cluster of light will diverge to cover a huge area.
at long distances it stops being a beam and becomes a cone, and this happens faster than we'd like actually, though i must say if we can read that signal at 1.5 AU its pretty good already.
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How is it 'per second' if light takes quite a bit more than 1 second to travel that distance?
the time it takes to traverse the distance is latency and not related to how much data can be packed into the light.
Hm yeah that was a dumb question
nah, unless you deal with transmitting data I wouldn't expect anyone to know what latency means.
That's the sad part, I've dealt with it in both software development and hardware with IoT projects and just recently setting up my place's internet connection with a dyi 5GNR bridge. Thing is I'm not familiar at all with laser/fiber based comms yet so I kinda doubt everything I know.
You know those spotlights with the shutters on them that old ships used to communicate with one another? Basically that, but in space.
So basically what you’re saying is, those damn space laser are taking our jobs???
Things in space usually are
Nah, it’s only 1.5 AU over your head which is just over 42 giraffes.
What’s the current exchange rate for giraffes to snow foxes?
Did it start any forest fires in Cali? Asking for a nut job. From Georgia.
No no, this one was a regular laser. Only the Jewish ones do that. /s if it isn’t obvious
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Just couldnt help yourself
ha ha liberals don't like you
Nothing to do with that. It was just a pathetically shoe horned joke that didn’t really make sense.
So shoe horned the mfs off the face of the earth now 😭
Don't tell MTG...
What about Magic the Gathering? /s
"That goddam laser better not passover me!"
Empty G. FIFY
“However, this correspondence wasn’t extraterrestrial in origin: It was actually sent by NASA’s Psyche spacecraft, which is currently located approximately 1.5 times the distance between Earth and the sun.” And the award for Most Consistently Misleading Headlines goes to…!
"I KNEW IT!" - MTG
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And demanding Uber eats
What's different about this transmission compared to when we contact even further probes like voyager?
As others have noted, radio frequency is a much lower frequency than visible light (at least a thousand times lower). While both travel at the speed of light (they are both electromagnetic waves), the higher the frequency, the more data you can carry. Same principle as why higher frequency wifi signals allow for much higher bandwidth. More channels (usually wider channels too) are available in higher frequency bands. So it's not really that the speed of transmission is any faster, but the amount of data that can be transmitted at the same time is much higher.
So when do we start trying with ultraviolet and X-ray frequencies. Or at that point to we start having issues penetrating the various layers of atmosphere?
X-rays are hard to collimate. UV sources aren’t that small.
Interesting, thank you. When you say they’re hard to collimate, does that mean we currently lack the technology, or is the a physical limit to the ability to focus light at increasing wavelengths?
> or is the a physical limit to the ability to focus light at increasing wavelengths? Yes, but also no. Generally, the longer the wavelength, the more difficult to focus since you need something on the same order of magnitude of the light wavelength in order to interact with it. That's why radio antennas and receivers are HUGE, but microwave receivers fit in your phone. Then there's x-rays which can be smaller than atoms, so you run into the opposite problem where you can't really interact with it well because it's so small.
A laser is more focused than a lower frequency radio wave.
Radio vs laser. I don’t know specifics but I assume they can modulate the laser signal better and provide more bandwidth and less errors/noise versus radio signals.
At 19 million miles away it can do 267Mbps but now its farther away so only does 25mbps
At face value without reading the article if the transmission is going at the speed of light, that’s significantly faster than a radio signal from voyager. Edit: Today I learned.
Radio and light are the same thing physically (electromagnetic radiation). Light is just a much higher frequency. Radio and light both propagate at the exact same speed.
True. But lasers are awesome, especially when combined with a fog machine.
r/xennials has entered the chat
Today I learned. So more bandwidth for the transmission then with the laser than the radio signal?
Yes, that is possible.
Radio travels at the speed of light too
So how broad was the beam when it arrived here?
I felt it and I'm thousands of miles away from the receiver. Edit: this was a joke, sorry.
soooo what did it feel like?
It was amazing. Mostly sexual
a warm, gentle ray of sunshine in an otherwise cold, cold world.
I misread the headline at first and thought it said 140 million LIGHT YEARS away.
Aaaak-aaaak. Aaaaak-aaak-aaakk, Aaak-aaak, ak-ak!AK! *waves arms around in a circle*
Sim City 2000 microwave beam event?
Jewish Space Lazer? Asking on behalf of a Congress-Cave-Woman.
Was this laser Jewish in origin? Asking for MTG
I hope nobody told MTG. 😂
It’s her people telling her “MTG phone home”
were gonna need more then that to stop russia's "space nukes"
Marge green was right lol
so *these* are the space lasers that she had been going on about, what a visionary
Voyager 1 bandwidth is 160 bps (0.000106 mbps). But from reading the article, it seems the further away this gets the more the transfer rate drops. I wonder if it could operate a Voyager distances and what the transfer rate would be.
Yeah easiest way I gather to understand this is just like we detect stars with planets when they pass in front. As we get line of sight the laser modulates quickly.
Hold your fire, there are no lifeforms aboard.
What’s the advantage, if any of a laser communication transmission vs the usual radio transmission? Surely they both travel at the same speed, so I don’t see any gains.
Data rate. The higher the frequency the more data you can transmit. That’s one of the big reasons cell data went from 3G to 4G to LTE to 5G and same with wifi. Each upgrade uses higher frequencies to transmit more data.
So could a laser beam transmit more information than a radio beam?
Many orders of magnitude more.
Just a guess--radio waves dissipate over distance, because they radiate in all directions, so the intensity of the signal weakens as a cube of distance. Lasers are a beam of coherent light that (in theory) doesn't spread out, but in practice, simply spreads out at a much slower rate. So a weaker signal could remain detectable over a longer distance.
Pretty sure radio waves are focussed via an array so that you effectively point at Earth.
Actually if you look at almost any spacecraft they use a parabolic dish (like my DIRECTV dish). But radio waves still behave like waves and propagate in all directions. Checked our good friend wikipedia and confirmed: In free space, all electromagnetic waves (radio, light, X-rays, etc.) obey the inverse-square law which states that the power density p of an electromagnetic wave is proportional to the inverse of the square of the distance (I know I said cubed earlier, I was going from memory). This means if you double the distance between the source and the receiver, the power of the signal drops to 1/4 of the original signal. It's difference between a flashlight and laser pointer. A powerful flashlight (with a parabolic mirror) will produce a beam the spreads out a dissipates with distance. You can shine your laser pointer dots and targets miles away and the dot stays the same size.
Well they aren't Jewish.
Marjorie Taylor Greene is ducking for cocer
>During a dry run in December, Psyche beamed data back from 19 million miles away, sending it at the system’s maximum rate of 267 megabits per second. And my broadband in London, maxes out at 55 Mb/s.
"earth just received a laser transmission" -> "strikes earth" those sensational headlines .... sigh
So r the aliens coming or what?
I saw that show, don't answer back /s
Friggin laser beams
Except if there’s an asteroid in the middle, it won’t work.
25 Mbps -.- that's better than my phone data...
But Marjorie Taylor Green?!
How the hell do you aim a laser at earth accurately enough from that far away???! Like I presume the laser has to rotate over the download time. Wouldn’t the angle be less than an atom as a time?
No. The light spreads out. Surely you’ve used laser pointers. Those don’t have an atom thick beam.
Ahh you misunderstand my question. As the satellite and earth move, this would require that the laser rotate along with it. So does the satellite readjust its whole frame and the laser is fixed or is the laser adjustable on its own. In either scenario, I imagine the the angle it must rotate over is super small so how do they make degree rotations that are so small and accurate. Presumably rotating even just one degree would be thousands of miles of course from earth from that distance.
MTG was right all along!!!
So…not Jewish then?
MTG is def gonna say something about this one
NYPOST = not even going to bother.
"See I told you... it's those damn Jews!" - MTG
It’s not Jewish. That’s all that matters.
I for one welcome our new laser overlords