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[Playful music]

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[Narrator] Did you know
NASA streamed

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a cat video from Deep Space?

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[Team member] We got taters!

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[laughter] 

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[Team member 2] Yay, Taters!

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[Seán Meenehan]
DSOC is the Deep Space

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Optical Communications project.

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It is the first demonstration

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of using lasers instead
of radio waves, 

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to transmit data to
and from a spacecraft

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out to distances
beyond lunar orbit.

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[Announcer]
Two.

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One.

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Engine ignition.

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[Narrator] The
experiment launched

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in October 2023,

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attached to the side of NASA's
Psyche spacecraft.

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And for its first big test,
it streamed a cat video.

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[Seán] Why was it
a cat video?

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Because the internet loves cats?

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[Narrator] Future
astronauts are gonna

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faster broadband-style

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connections with Earth
than is currently available:

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for navigation, health
updates, streaming video,

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and for sending back science.

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This is the first step
in making that possible.

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So how does it work?

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Let's zoom in with
laser precision to find out.

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Not far from Los Angeles,

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JPL's Table Mountain
facility plays a big role.

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The Optical Communications
Telescope Laboratory sends

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a powerful laser beacon over
millions of miles to Psyche.

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[Angel Velasco] How we've done
that is by using

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ten separate lasers.

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So we have ten lasers
that come into the enclosure.

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We have ten individual channels.

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So you see there's kind of ten

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of these collimators,
those long clear cylinders.

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We have a few lenses that
then shapes the beam to get it

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the right size,

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so by the time
it gets to Psyche,

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you know, millions of million
kilometers away,

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it has the right shape.

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[Narrator] Think of it as a
cosmic game of catch:

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Table Mountain throws
the pitch, Psyche catches it.

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Imagine walking outside at night
with a laser pointer

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and try to point it
back at Mars.

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That's the kind of level
of accuracy we need to achieve.

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And after catching
Table Mountain's signal,

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Psyche used its own laser
to send data back to Earth.

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Reaching a
record-breaking distance

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of over 300 million miles.

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That's more than three times

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the distance between
the Earth and the sun.

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The Palomar Observatory

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uses its powerful
200 inch Hale telescope

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to catch Psyche's laser light,
which is now extremely faint.

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After traveling
millions of miles.

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[Emma Wollman] So by the time
the signal from the spacecraft

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reaches us here at Palomar,
it has spread out over the Earth

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so that the light level's
very faint.

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It's on the single particle
of light level called photons.

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And the way that we send data
using these photons

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is to encode the data in the
time of arrival of laser pulses,

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kind of like sending Morse code
using a laser pointer.

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The light from the telescope
gets relayed down

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onto this optical rail here,

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and then into
this optical system,

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which you can see on that bench.

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The optics
then takes the light

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and focuses it down onto
a detector in this cryostat,

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which operates at a temperature

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just one degree above
absolute zero.

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Inside this chamber,
there's a detector

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very similar to this
with a very tiny active area.

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So we're taking the light
from our giant telescope

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and coupling it down
to less than a millimeter.

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[Narrator] And tracking a
moving spacecraft across

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the solar system is not easy,
but when conditions are right,

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data flies.

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[Emma] MOS, this is GLR.

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We're starting to see
flashes of light.

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[Meera Srinivasan] DSOC broke
records almost

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immediately
after being commissioned.

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We have established

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data rate records giving
broadband comparable data rates

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in the hundreds of megabits per
second from Mars close range.

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That's the first time
that anything has been done

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like this
at distances beyond the Moon.

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[Seán] The idea here
is to slowly start

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having more
optical communications,

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rather than radio
frequency communications,

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to just get more data down

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from space.

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There's kind of bottlenecks now
in just how much volume of data

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we can get down in
a given amount of time

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from the transmitters
that we have.

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[Angel] So we have the downlink
signal from Psyche...

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...right there.

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That's four watts from

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135 million miles away.

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[Meera] One of the things
that we hope to do

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is enable internet
around the solar system.

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[Seán] You can send
an astronaut to Mars

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and have them take
like a high def video

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of the Martian landscape and
send that down in like one pass.

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[Narrator] A new era of space
communications has begun.

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And it all starts
with a beam of light.