DSOC’s Table Mountain Facility Uplink Laser – Infrared vs. Seen Gentle

Figure A

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This infrared {photograph} exhibits the uplink laser beacon for NASA’s Deep Space Optical Communications (DSOC) experiment beaming into the night time sky from the Optical Communications Telescope Laboratory (OCTL) at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s Table Mountain Facility close to Wrightwood, California. Attached to the company’s Psyche spacecraft, the DSOC flight laser transceiver can obtain and ship information from Earth in encoded photons.

Figure A exhibits the identical scene in seen gentle. While the laser is transmitting in each images, it is just seen when utilizing an infrared filter.

As the experiment’s floor laser transmitter, OCTL transmits at an infrared wavelength of 1,064 nanometers from its 3.3-foot-aperture (1-meter) telescope. The telescope may also obtain faint infrared photons (at a wavelength of 1,550 nanometers) from the 4-watt flight laser transceiver on Psyche. Neither infrared wavelength is definitely absorbed or scattered by Earth’s environment, making each preferrred for deep house optical communications.

To obtain probably the most distant indicators from Psyche, the undertaking enlisted the highly effective 200-inch-aperture (5-meter) Hale Telescope at Caltech’s Palomar Observatory in San Diego County, California, as its major downlink station, which offered satisfactory light-collecting space to seize the faintest photons. Those photons have been then directed to a cryogenically cooled superconducting high-efficiency detector array on the observatory the place the knowledge encoded within the photons could possibly be processed.

Managed by JPL, DSOC was designed to exhibit that information encoded in laser photons could possibly be reliably transmitted, obtained, after which decoded after touring tens of millions of miles from Earth out to Mars distances. Nearly two years after launching aboard the company’s Psyche mission in 2023, the demonstration accomplished its sixty fifth and remaining “pass” on Sept. 2, 2025, sending a laser sign to Psyche and receiving the return sign from 218 million miles (350 million kilometers) away.

Caltech manages JPL for NASA. This demonstration is the newest in a sequence of optical communication experiments funded by the Space Technology Mission Directorate’s Technology Demonstration Missions Program managed at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, and the company’s SCaN (Space Communications and Navigation) program within the Space Operations Mission Directorate. The Psyche mission is led by Arizona State University. Lindy Elkins-Tanton of the University of California, Berkeley is the principal investigator. A division of Caltech in Pasadena, JPL is chargeable for the mission’s general administration.

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