NASA once again made history when it managed to stream video in high resolution from a distance of 31 million kilometers from the earth. The 15-second video below was streamed from the Pysche spacecraft to Earth using the Deep Space Optical Communication (DSOC) laser communication system.
The video was streamed using the DSOC laser at a speed of 267 Mbps and took 101 seconds to reach Earth because Psyche was at that time more than 80 times further away than the distance between the Earth and the Moon. DSOC was developed because the radio signal communication technology used today is slow and has a bandwidth – around 5.2 Mbps – that is too small to support more complex communications in the future.
If humans want to build a colony on Mars or other planets, a high-resolution video communication system and large data transmission back to earth is indispensable.
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