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.

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