Netflix auf dem Mars? Ja, vielleicht, dank der Laserkommunikationsdemo der NASA – optische Kommunikation nicht nur für Nachtschwärmer

From the article

NASA’s Deep Space Optical Communication (DSOC) technology demonstration has notched up another performance milestone as it approaches a year in space.

The laser communications demo, which is riding on board NASA’s Psyche spacecraft, has been breaking records as Psyche speeds toward its destination. In April, from 140 million miles (225 million kilometres) away from Earth it managed data transfer rates of 25 Mbps. On June 24, at 240 million miles (386 million kilometres), the demonstration achieved a sustained downlink data rate of 6.25 Mbps, peaking at 8.3 Mbps.

Although the figures are no longer high enough to merit sarcastic comparisons with Earthly broadband, they are considerably better than what could be achieved by a radio system using comparable power.

In the latest metric, recorded at the end of July when Psyche was 290 million miles (460 million km) from Earth, approximately the farthest Earth and Mars can be apart, the team managed to communicate with the experiment again. The feat was made all the more impressive by the fact Psyche had entered the daytime sky by then, and so only the one-metre telescope of the Optical Communications Telescope Laboratory (OCTL) at JPL’s Table Mountain facility, in California’s San Gabriel mountains, could be used.