NASA’s Deep Space Optical Comms mission sends and receives first data

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A NASA experiment that could ‘transform’ how spacecraft communicate has achieved ‘first light,’ sending data via laser to and from far beyond the Moon for the first time.

NASA’s Psyche spacecraft is shown in a clean room at the Astrotech Space Operations facility near the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Dec. 8, 2022. DSOC’s gold-capped flight laser transceiver can be seen, near center, attached to the spacecraft.
NASA’s Psyche spacecraft is shown in a clean room at the Astrotech Space Operations facility near the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Dec. 8, 2022. DSOC’s gold-capped flight laser transceiver can be seen, near center, attached to the spacecraft. - NASA/Ben Smegelsky

NASA’s Deep Space Optical Communications (DSOC) experiment has beamed a near-infrared laser encoded with test data from nearly 10 million miles away – about 40 times farther than the Moon is from Earth – to the Hale Telescope at Caltech’s Palomar Observatory in San Diego County, California.

NASA said that this is the farthest-ever demonstration of optical communications.

Launched recently aboard the Psyche spacecraft, DSOC is configured to send high-bandwidth test data to Earth during its two-year technology demonstration as Psyche travels to the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.

NASA announced that the tech demo achieved ‘first light’ in the early hours of November 14, 2023, after its flight laser transceiver – an instrument aboard Psyche capable of sending and receiving near-infrared signals – locked onto an uplink laser beacon transmitted from the Optical Communications Telescope Laboratory at NASA’s JPL Table Mountain Facility near Wrightwood, California.

The uplink beacon helped the transceiver aim its downlink laser back to Palomar (100 miles south of Table Mountain), while automated systems on the transceiver and ground stations ‘fine-tuned’ its pointing.

In a statement, Trudy Kortes, director of technology demonstrations for the Space Technology Mission Directorate at NASA, said: “Achieving first light is one of many critical DSOC milestones in the coming months, paving the way toward higher-data-rate communications capable of sending scientific information, high-definition imagery, and streaming video in support of humanity’s next giant leap: sending humans to Mars.”

Test data was also sent simultaneously via the uplink and downlink lasers, a procedure known as ‘closing the link’ that NASA said is a primary objective for the experiment.

“Tuesday morning’s test was the first to fully incorporate the ground assets and flight transceiver, requiring the DSOC and Psyche operations teams to work in tandem,” said Meera Srinivasan, operations lead for DSOC at JPL.

“It was a formidable challenge, and we have a lot more work to do, but for a short time, we were able to transmit, receive, and decode some data.”

NASA said the DSOC team will now work on refining the systems that control the pointing of the downlink laser aboard the transceiver, so the project can begin its demonstration of maintaining high-bandwidth data transmission from the transceiver to Palomar at various distances from Earth.

The DSOC experiment aims to demonstrate data transmission rates 10 – 100 times greater than radio frequency systems used by spacecraft today. Using near-infrared light, which packs the data into significantly tighter waves, enables ground stations to receive more data.

NASA said this will help future human and robotic exploration missions and support higher-resolution science instruments in deep space, as ‘more data means more discoveries.’

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