[Playful music]
[Narrator] Did you know NASA streamed
a cat video from Deep Space?
[Team member] We got taters!
[laughter]
[Team member 2] Yay, Taters!
[Seán Meenehan] DSOC is the Deep Space
Optical Communications project.
It is the first demonstration
of using lasers instead of radio waves,
to transmit data to and from a spacecraft
out to distances beyond lunar orbit.
[Announcer] Two.
One.
Engine ignition.
[Narrator] The experiment launched
in October 2023,
attached to the side of NASA's Psyche spacecraft.
And for its first big test, it streamed a cat video.
[Seán] Why was it a cat video?
Because the internet loves cats?
[Narrator] Future astronauts are gonna
faster broadband-style
connections with Earth than is currently available:
for navigation, health updates, streaming video,
and for sending back science.
This is the first step in making that possible.
So how does it work?
Let's zoom in with laser precision to find out.
Not far from Los Angeles,
JPL's Table Mountain facility plays a big role.
The Optical Communications Telescope Laboratory sends
a powerful laser beacon over millions of miles to Psyche.
[Angel Velasco] How we've done that is by using
ten separate lasers.
So we have ten lasers that come into the enclosure.
We have ten individual channels.
So you see there's kind of ten
of these collimators, those long clear cylinders.
We have a few lenses that then shapes the beam to get it
the right size,
so by the time it gets to Psyche,
you know, millions of million kilometers away,
it has the right shape.
[Narrator] Think of it as a cosmic game of catch:
Table Mountain throws the pitch, Psyche catches it.
Imagine walking outside at night with a laser pointer
and try to point it back at Mars.
That's the kind of level of accuracy we need to achieve.
And after catching Table Mountain's signal,
Psyche used its own laser to send data back to Earth.
Reaching a record-breaking distance
of over 300 million miles.
That's more than three times
the distance between the Earth and the sun.
The Palomar Observatory
uses its powerful 200 inch Hale telescope
to catch Psyche's laser light, which is now extremely faint.
After traveling millions of miles.
[Emma Wollman] So by the time the signal from the spacecraft
reaches us here at Palomar, it has spread out over the Earth
so that the light level's very faint.
It's on the single particle of light level called photons.
And the way that we send data using these photons
is to encode the data in the time of arrival of laser pulses,
kind of like sending Morse code using a laser pointer.
The light from the telescope gets relayed down
onto this optical rail here,
and then into this optical system,
which you can see on that bench.
The optics then takes the light
and focuses it down onto a detector in this cryostat,
which operates at a temperature
just one degree above absolute zero.
Inside this chamber, there's a detector
very similar to this with a very tiny active area.
So we're taking the light from our giant telescope
and coupling it down to less than a millimeter.
[Narrator] And tracking a moving spacecraft across
the solar system is not easy, but when conditions are right,
data flies.
[Emma] MOS, this is GLR.
We're starting to see flashes of light.
[Meera Srinivasan] DSOC broke records almost
immediately after being commissioned.
We have established
data rate records giving broadband comparable data rates
in the hundreds of megabits per second from Mars close range.
That's the first time that anything has been done
like this at distances beyond the Moon.
[Seán] The idea here is to slowly start
having more optical communications,
rather than radio frequency communications,
to just get more data down
from space.
There's kind of bottlenecks now in just how much volume of data
we can get down in a given amount of time
from the transmitters that we have.
[Angel] So we have the downlink signal from Psyche...
...right there.
That's four watts from
135 million miles away.
[Meera] One of the things that we hope to do
is enable internet around the solar system.
[Seán] You can send an astronaut to Mars
and have them take like a high def video
of the Martian landscape and send that down in like one pass.
[Narrator] A new era of space communications has begun.
And it all starts with a beam of light.