NASA transmits 8-laser beacon over 350 million km in deep-space demo

22 Sep 2025

Transmission to Psyche craft by Jet Propulsion Lab facility in California “exceeds project expectations”.

NASA’s Deep Space Optical Communications technology has efficiently confirmed that information encoded in lasers could possibly be reliably transmitted, obtained, and decoded after touring hundreds of thousands of miles from Earth at distances akin to Mars.

Nearly two years after launching aboard the company’s Psyche mission in 2023, the expertise demonstration just lately accomplished its sixty fifth and ultimate move, sending a laser sign to Psyche and receiving the return sign, from 218 million miles (350 million kilometers) away.

“NASA is setting America on the path to Mars, and advancing laser communications technologies brings us one step closer to streaming high-definition video and delivering valuable data from the Martian surface faster than ever before,” mentioned appearing NASA Administrator Sean Duffy. “Technology unlocks discovery, and we are committed to testing and proving the capabilities needed to enable the Golden Age of exploration.”

‘Record-breaking’

Just a month after launch, the Deep Space Optical Communications demonstration proved it may ship a sign again to Earth it established a hyperlink with the optical terminal aboard the Psyche spacecraft.

“NASA Technology tests hardware in the harsh environment of space to understand its limits and prove its capabilities,” mentioned Clayton Turner, affiliate administrator, Space Technology Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “Over two years, this technology surpassed our expectations, demonstrating data rates comparable to those of household broadband internet.”

On December eleventh, 2023, the demonstration achieved a historic first by streaming an ultra-high-definition video to Earth from over 19 million miles away (about 80 instances the gap between Earth and the Moon), on the system’s most bitrate of 267 megabits per second.

The mission additionally surpassed optical communications distance information on December third, 2024, when it downlinked Psyche information from 307 million miles away (farther than the common distance between Earth and Mars). In whole, the experiment’s floor terminals obtained 13.6 terabits of information from Psyche.

Managed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California, the experiment consists of a flight laser transceiver mounted on the Psyche spacecraft, together with two floor stations to obtain and ship information from Earth. A robust 3-kilowatt uplink laser at JPL’s Table Mountain Facility transmitted a laser beacon to Psyche, serving to the transceiver decide the place to purpose the optical communications laser again to Earth.

Both Psyche and Earth are transferring via area at super speeds, and they’re so distant from one another that the laser sign — which travels on the velocity of sunshine — can take a number of minutes to achieve its vacation spot. By utilizing the exact pointing required from the bottom and flight laser transmitters to shut the communication hyperlink, groups at NASA proved that optical communications could be finished to assist future missions all through the photo voltaic system.

Another component of the experiment included detecting and decoding a faint sign after the laser traveled hundreds of thousands of miles. The mission enlisted a 200-inch telescope at Caltech’s Palomar Observatory in San Diego County as its main downlink station, which supplied sufficient light-collecting space to gather the faintest photons. Those photons had been then directed to a high-efficiency detector array on the observatory, the place the data encoded within the photons could possibly be processed.

“We faced many challenges, from weather events that shuttered our ground stations to wildfires in Southern California that impacted our team members,” mentioned Abi Biswas, Deep Space Optical Communications mission technologist and supervisor at JPL. “But we persevered, and I am proud that our team embraced the weekly routine of optically transmitting and receiving data from Psyche.”

Video explainer

The following video, produced by NASA/JPL-Caltech, describes how the Deep Space Optical Communications experiment broke information and the way the expertise demonstration may pave the best way for future high-bandwidth information transmission out to Mars distances and past.