NASA's DSOC Swaps Radios for Lasers to Provide High-Bandwidth Deep Space Communications
Designed to operate at distances of up to 1 AU (93 million miles), DSOC is ready for its mission to Psyche.
NASA's Deep Space Optical Communications (DSOC) project, which aims to prove the capabilities of light-based communication from beyond the moon, has completed its spacecraft-level testing — offering a means to provide high-bandwidth transmissions, including of high-definition video, from robotic and manned missions.
Designed to replace traditional radio communications systems as a means of dramatically increasing sustained data throughput, the DSOC platform uses a flight laser transceiver system talking to a downlink receiver and uplink laser on the ground — pushing an impressive 5.6kW average power in order to reach a spacecraft out beyond the moon, further than optical communications have ever been used before.
"Using multiple individual laser sources that propagate through sub-apertures on the telescope’s primary mirror relieves the power requirement from a single source," explains NASA's Malcolm Wright of one of the ways DSOC aims to boost efficiency. "It also allows atmospheric turbulence mitigation and reduces the power density on the telescope mirrors."
The ground-based receiver is installed at Palomar Observatory's Hale Telescope and the transmitter at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) Table Mountain facility, while the space-based transceiver is installed onto NASA's Psyche craft — which will take it into space as part of a mission to an asteroid, also called Psyche, which orbits between Mars and Jupiter. During its flight to the asteroid DSOC's team aims to prove its ability to lock onto the ground station, transmit at a more rapid rate than radio-based alternatives, and to sustain a communications link up to a distance of one astronomical unit or 93 million miles.
The most recent round of testing, full results from which will be presented by Wright at the Optica Laser Congress next week, has proven the hardware for environmental stability as well as its ability to interface with the rest of the electronics. The next step: integrating it into the Psyche spacecraft ahead of launch.
More information on the DSOC project is available on NASA's website.
