NASA Uses Laser to Test Video Transmission Capability in Deep Space

NASA has sent a 15-second ultra-high-definition streaming video from Earth to a Deep Space Optical Communications payload some 19 million miles away using lasers.

The demonstration, part of the two-year DSOC experimentation, involved NASA operators sending the video to the flight laser transceiver, a DSOC instrument installed on the Psyche spacecraft capable of sending and receiving near-infrared signals. Operators sent the laser signal from Earth, which was received by the transceiver and returned to the Hale Telescope at the California Institute of Technology’s Palomar Observatory in San Diego, where the video was downloaded.

The transceiver returned the video signal to Earth at its maximum rate of 267 megabits per second, taking less than two minutes to reach Earth, NASA said.

The video transmission test follows another first for NASA’s DSOC experimentation in November, where the agency sent and received data through a laser beam. Like the video transmission test, NASA scientists beamed the laser from Earth to the payload some 10 million miles away while the transceiver returned the signal to the Hale Telescope.

DSOC is designed to test NASA’s high-bandwidth optical communications platforms designed for long-distance, space-based communications.