“First Light”: NASA receives a laser beam message from a distance of 16 million kilometers

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(CNN) — A groundbreaking experiment aboard NASA’s Psyche mission has just reached its first milestone by successfully conducting the longest laser communications demonstration. The technology test could one day help the agency’s missions delve deeper into space exploration and discover more about the origins of the universe.

The Psyche mission, launched in mid-October, aims to capture humanity’s first glimpse of a metallic asteroid located between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. The spacecraft is scheduled to spend the next six years traveling a distance of 3.6 billion kilometers to reach the asteroid of the same name, located in the outer part of the main asteroid belt.

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Added to the flight is the Deep Space Optical Communications (DSOC) technology demonstration, which will carry out its own mission during the first two years of the flight.

The technology demonstration is designed to serve as NASA’s farthest high-bandwidth laser communications experiment, testing the transmission and reception of data to and from Earth using an invisible near-infrared laser. The laser can transmit data at 10 to 100 times the speed of conventional radio wave systems used by NASA on other missions. If this experiment is successful in the coming years, it could be the future basis for technology used to communicate with humans exploring Mars.

On this path, DSOC recently achieved what engineers call “first light”: the feat of successfully sending and receiving its first data.

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The experiment fired a laser encoded with data from places far beyond the moon for the first time. The test data was transmitted from a distance of approximately 16 million kilometers and arrived at the Hale Telescope at Caltech’s Palomar Observatory in Pasadena, California.

The DSOC team worked during the early morning hours of November 14 in the Psyche mission support area at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, to view “first light.”

The distance between DSOC and Hale was about 40 times greater than the distance between the Moon and Earth.

“Achieving first light is one of many important milestones for DSOC in the coming months, paving the way for higher data rate communications, capable of sending scientific information, high-definition images and video streaming to support humanity’s next greatest leap: sending humans to Earth.” Trudy Curtis, technology demonstration manager for NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate, said in a statement:

Sending laser beams through space

First light, achieved on November 14, occurred when the flight’s laser transceiver instrument on Psyche received a laser beacon sent from the Optical Communications Telescope Laboratory at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s (JPL) Table Mountain facility near Wrightwood, California.

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The initial beacon received by the Psyche transceiver helped the device direct the laser to send data to the Hale Telescope, located about 100 miles south of Table Mountain.

“The (Nov. 14) test was the first to fully integrate ground and flight transponder assets, requiring the DSOC and Psyche operations teams to work together,” said Meera Srinivasan, DSOC operations lead at JPL, based in Pasadena, California. “It was a huge challenge and we had a lot of work to do, but for a short time we were able to send, receive and decrypt some data.”

DSOC’s ground-based laser transmitter operators were at the Optical Communications Telescope Laboratory at JPL’s Table Mountain facility near Wrightwood, California, to conduct the first experiment.

This is not the first time laser communications have been investigated in space. The first two-way laser communication test was conducted in December 2021, when NASA’s laser communications relay demonstration was launched and entered orbit about 35,406 kilometers from Earth.

Since then, experiments have sent optical communications from low Earth orbit to the Moon. The Artemis II spacecraft will use laser communications to return high-definition video of a manned flight around the moon. But DSOC represents the first time laser communications have been sent across deep space, requiring incredibly precise aiming up to millions of kilometres.

Initial testing of the technical demonstration capabilities will allow the team to work on improving the systems used for laser guidance precision. Once the team checks this box, DSOC will be ready to send and receive data to the Hale Telescope as the spacecraft moves away from Earth.

Future challenges

While DSOC will not actually send back the scientific data collected by the Psyche spacecraft because it is an experiment, a laser will be used to send back parts of the test data encoded in laser photons, or quantum light particles.

Detector arrays on Earth can pick up the Psyche signal and extract data from the photons. This type of optical communications could change the way NASA sends and receives data from its deep space missions.

“Optical communication is a boon for scientists and researchers who always want more from their space missions and will enable human exploration of deep space,” said Dr. Jason Mitchell, Director of Advanced Communications and Navigation Technologies at POT. “More data means more discoveries,” he added.

As Psyche continues her journey, more challenges await her.

The DSOC team will monitor how long it takes for laser messages to travel through space. During first light, the laser took only 50 seconds to travel from Psyche to Earth. At the farthest distance between the spacecraft and Earth, the laser is expected to take 20 minutes to travel in one direction. During that time, the spacecraft will continue to move and the Earth will rotate.

Meanwhile, the Psyche spacecraft continues to prepare for its primary mission, running propulsion systems and testing the scientific instruments it will need to study the asteroid when the time comes, in July 2029. The mission can determine whether the asteroid is the exposed core of the asteroid. One of the first building blocks of planets from the beginning of the solar system.

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