Abhijit Biswas and Erik Alerstam

Launched on October 13, 2023, the spacecraft is traveling outbound to 16 Psyche, a metal rich asteroid that will be 250 million miles from the Sun when the craft arrives in August 2029. Many tests of the laser communications system will be carried out during the six year journey. All of the science data, however, will be sent do Earth using transmissions at radio frequencies. (NASA/JPL)

A NASA pathfinder experiment, DSOC is a communications package that will use near-infrared lasers to transmit data between Earth and distant planetary spacecraft. The goal is to increase data transmission rates by 10 to 100 times compared to conventional radio.

DSOC achieved "First Light" on November 14, 2023 after the flight laser transceiver on the Psyche spacecraft locked on to an uplink beacon transmitted from JPL's Table Mountain Facility. The transceiver then used its downlink laser to send a reply that was received 10 million miles away by the Hale Telescope on Palomar Mountain.