From Taters to Terabits: NASA Wraps Up Deep Space Laser Test

NASA’s Deep Space Optical Communications (DSOC) technology demonstration has successfully concluded after two years, surpassing all technical goals and paving the way for future high-speed data transmission from Mars. Flying aboard the agency’s Psyche spacecraft, DSOC proved that laser-encoded data could be transmitted and received reliably from distances over 200 million miles, achieving broadband-like speeds. From streaming an ultra-high-definition video of a cat named “Taters” across deep space to downlinking record-breaking volumes of spacecraft data, the project marked a major leap in communications technology that could benefit NASA’s human exploration efforts. https://www.nasa.gov/mission/deep-space-optical-communications-dsoc/ https://science.nasa.gov/mission/psyche/ Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

What is said in the film

Did you know NASA streamed a cat video from Deep Space? We got taters! Yay, Taters! DSOC is the Deep Space Optical Communications project. It is the first demonstration of using lasers instead of radio waves, to transmit data to and from a spacecraft out to distances beyond lunar orbit.

Two. One. Engine ignition. The experiment launched in October 2023, attached to the side of NASA's Psyche spacecraft. And for its first big test, it streamed a cat video.

Why was it a cat video? Because the internet loves cats? Future astronauts are gonna faster broadband-style connections with Earth than is currently available: for navigation, health updates, streaming video, and for sending back science. This is the first step in making that possible. So how does it work?

Let's zoom in with laser precision to find out. Not far from Los Angeles, JPL's Table Mountain facility plays a big role. The Optical Communications Telescope Laboratory sends a powerful laser beacon over millions of miles to Psyche. How we've done that is by using ten separate lasers. So we have ten lasers that come into the enclosure.

We have ten individual channels. So you see there's kind of ten of these collimators, those long clear cylinders. We have a few lenses that then shapes the beam to get it the right size, so by the time it gets to Psyche, you know, millions of million kilometers away, it has the right shape. Think of it as a cosmic game of catch: Table Mountain throws the pitch, Psyche catches it. Imagine walking outside at night with a laser pointer and try to point it back at Mars.

That's the kind of level of accuracy we need to achieve. And after catching Table Mountain's signal, Psyche used its own laser to send data back to Earth. Reaching a record-breaking distance of over 300 million miles. That's more than three times the distance between the Earth and the sun. The Palomar Observatory uses its powerful 200 inch Hale telescope to catch Psyche's laser light, which is now extremely faint.

After traveling millions of miles. So by the time the signal from the spacecraft reaches us here at Palomar, it has spread out over the Earth so that the light level's very faint. It's on the single particle of light level called photons. And the way that we send data using these photons is to encode the data in the time of arrival of laser pulses, kind of like sending Morse code using a laser pointer. The light from the telescope gets relayed down onto this optical rail here, and then into this optical system, which you can see on that bench.

The optics then takes the light and focuses it down onto a detector in this cryostat, which operates at a temperature just one degree above absolute zero. Inside this chamber, there's a detector very similar to this with a very tiny active area. So we're taking the light from our giant telescope and coupling it down to less than a millimeter. And tracking a moving spacecraft across the solar system is not easy, but when conditions are right, data flies. MOS, this is GLR.

We're starting to see flashes of light. DSOC broke records almost immediately after being commissioned. We have established data rate records giving broadband comparable data rates in the hundreds of megabits per second from Mars close range. That's the first time that anything has been done like this at distances beyond the Moon. The idea here is to slowly start having more optical communications, rather than radio frequency communications, to just get more data down from space.

There's kind of bottlenecks now in just how much volume of data we can get down in a given amount of time from the transmitters that we have. So we have the downlink signal from Psyche... ... right there. That's four watts from 135 million miles away.

One of the things that we hope to do is enable internet around the solar system. You can send an astronaut to Mars and have them take like a high def video of the Martian landscape and send that down in like one pass. A new era of space communications has begun. And it all starts with a beam of light.

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