This mountaintop lab just fired a laser into the sky to talk to a distant spacecraft

Spend any time at all looking up at the night sky, and you’re bound to see some unusual lights appear at some point.

As any astronomer will attest, the sources of these inevitably turn out to be entirely mundane – aeroplanes, drones, lights from the Big Top because the circus has come to town, that kind of thing – but some are a little less mundane than others!

Take the unusual lights that appear in this image, for instance.

What you’re looking at is a picture of the Optical Communications Telescope Laboratory, which is housed at NASA JPL’s Table Mountain Facility in California.

And the twin beams of light emerging from it aren’t searchlights, as they might first appear – instead, they’re the proof that a newly developed communications protocol is working as intended.

Communicating with spacecraft

This photo was taken as the Laboratory was communicating with NASA’s Psyche spacecraft, which was 230 million kilometres (143 million miles) from Earth at the time.

Psyche launched in 2023 and is on its way to study asteroid 16 Psyche, which orbits the Sun between Mars and Jupiter.

The spacecraft is equipped with a Deep Space Optical Communications (DSOC) laser transceiver that has enabled two-way communication between the spacecraft and its ground station throughout its mission so far, with data encoded in laser photons.

DSOC technology has been developed as an intended replacement for the radio-frequency comms systems currently in use, which are slow and unwieldy.

NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, for instance, takes 1.5 hours to transmit a single high-resolution image.

In contrast, DSOC demonstrated its improved speed and resolution in a series of 65 experiments that involved sending different types of date back and forth across different distances, and from a number of different ground stations (including one in Europe).

DSOC’s achievements include sending a 15-second HD video – a preloaded clip of a cat chasing a red laser dot, what else? – back to Earth from a distance of 31 million kilometres (19 million miles) in just 101 seconds, and maintaining successful two-way communication at a distance of 467 million kilometres (290 million miles).

The final experiment was conducted on 2 September, when Psyche sent back data from a distance of 350 million kilometres (218 million miles).