NASA’s Deep Space Optical Communications (DSOC) has achieved “first light” as it successfully transmitted data through laser over a distance of 10 million miles.
Key points
- The DSOC experiment has beamed a near-infrared laser encoded with test data fromnearly 10 million miles (16 million kilometers) 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.
- This is the farthest-ever demonstration of optical communications.
- Riding aboard the recently launched 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.
- Test data also was sent simultaneously via the uplink and downlink lasers, a procedure known as “closing the link” that is a primary objective for the experiment.
- While optical communication has been demonstrated in low Earth orbit and out to the Moon, DSOC is the first test in deep space.
- “Deep space” is the vast, unexplored region of space that extends beyond our Moon, to Mars and across our solar system.
About DSOC experiment
- NASA’s DSOC experiment is the agency’s first demonstration of optical communications beyond the Earth-Moon system.
- DSOC is a system that consists of a flight laser transceiver, a ground laser transmitter, and a ground laser receiver.
- New advanced technologies have been implemented in each of these elements.
