Laser On NASA's Psyche Asteroid Probe Beams Data From 140 Million Miles Away

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Late last year, NASA scientists pressed start on a highly anticipated space mission. Basically, they launched a spacecraft toward an asteroid that could very well be made entirely of metal, a composition that appears to be a rarity ⁘ at least, in our solar system's vicinity. The robotic adventurer is called Psyche, and its namesake is the giant rock that guides its journey: 16 Psyche.

Not only did it transmit data to Earth from Psyche's location at the time, about 140 million miles (225 million kilometers) away ⁘ a record-breaking distance larger than the gap between our planet and the sun ⁘ but it also managed to beam back information gleaned straight from the spacecraft. This means that the DSOC transceiver actually interfaced with Psyche's radio transmitter and sent back concrete engineering data contained within the craft.

Still, this duplicated-data achievement, in itself, is a big deal for the experiment; though DSOC has been making headlines lately for various other milestones, there's been a caveat. For instance, in November of last year when it fired data back to Earth from 10 million miles (16 million km) away, and recently during a "turnaround test" in which scientists pinged the experiment with content, then got that content to be pinged back, DSOC wasn't beaming back any "real" information. It was pre-loaded test data that could be pulled out on command.

"We'd been sending test and diagnostic data in our downlinks from Psyche," Srinivasan said. "This represents a significant milestone for the project by showing how optical communications can interface with a spacecraft⁘s radio frequency comms system."

And now, if you're wondering about how the rate tests are going for DSOC, we'll have to get into the cat video.

And third, one part of the data was a stunning video of Taters . Who is Taters, you ask? Well, a sweet little orange Tabby cat, of course. (It would be an orange cat, wouldn't it?) This is also probably a good time to mention some of that recent "turnaround test" data involved pet pics as well.