00:01Did you know NASA streamed a cat video from deep space?
00:05We got taters!
00:07Damn taters!
00:08DSOC is the Deep Space Optical Communications Project.
00:11It is the first demonstration of using lasers instead of radio waves
00:16to transmit data to and from a spacecraft out to distances beyond lunar orbit.
00:21Two, one, engine ignition.
00:23The experiment launched in October 2023 attached to the side of NASA's Psyche spacecraft
00:29and for its first big test, it streamed a cat video.
00:34Why was it a cat video? Because the internet loves cats?
00:39Future astronauts are going to need faster broadband-style connections with Earth
00:43than is currently available for navigation, health updates, streaming video,
00:47and for sending back science.
00:49This is the first step in making that possible.
00:51So how does it work? Let's zoom in with laser precision to find out.
00:59Not far from Los Angeles, JPL's Table Mountain facility plays a big role.
01:04The Optical Communications Telescope Laboratory sends a powerful laser beacon
01:08over millions of miles to Psyche.
01:11How we've done that is by using 10 separate lasers.
01:14So we have 10 lasers that come into the enclosure.
01:17We have 10 individual channels.
01:19So you see there's kind of 10 of these collimators, those long, clear cylinders.
01:24We have a few lenses that then shapes the beam to get it the right size.
01:28So by the time it gets to Psyche, you know, millions to millions of kilometers away,
01:31it has the right shape.
01:33Think of it as a cosmic game of catch.
01:35Table Mountain throws the pitch, Psyche catches it.
01:38Imagine walking outside at night with a laser pointer and try to point it back at Mars.
01:43That's the kind of level of accuracy we need to achieve.
01:46And after catching Table Mountain's signal, Psyche used its own laser to send data back to Earth,
01:51reaching a record-breaking distance of over 300 million miles.
01:55That's more than three times the distance between the Earth and the Sun.
01:59The Palomar Observatory uses its powerful 200-inch Hale telescope to catch Psyche's laser light,
02:13which is now extremely faint after traveling millions of miles.
02:16So by the time the signal from the spacecraft reaches us here at Palomar,
02:21it has spread out over the Earth so that the light level is very faint.
02:24It's on the single particle of light level called photons.
02:27And the way that we send data using these photons is to encode the data in the time of arrival of laser pulses,
02:34kind of like sending Morse code using a laser pointer.
02:38The light from the telescope gets relayed down onto this optical rail here
02:43and then into this optical system, which you can see on that bench.
02:47The optics then takes the light and focuses it down onto a detector in this cryostat,
02:51which operates at a temperature just one degree above absolute zero.
02:55Inside this chamber, there's a detector very similar to this with a very tiny active area.
02:59So we're taking the light from our giant telescope and coupling it down to less than a millimeter.
03:04And tracking a moving spacecraft across the solar system is not easy.
03:08But when conditions are right, data flies.
03:10Data flies.
03:11MOS, this is GLR. We're starting to see flashes of light.
03:15DSOC broke records almost immediately after being commissioned.
03:20We have established data rate records giving broadband comparable data rates in the hundreds of megabits per second from Mars' close range.
03:29That's the first time that anything has been done like this at distances beyond the moon.
03:36The idea here is to slowly start having more optical communications rather than radio frequency communications
03:43to just get more data down from space.
03:46There'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.
03:52So we have the diamond signal from Psyche right there.
03:57That's both lots from 135 million miles away.
04:01One of the things that we hope to do is enable internet around the solar system.
04:08You 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.
04:17A new era of space communications has begun, and it all starts with a beam of light.
04:23.
