Overview
- NASA says the DSOC experiment exceeded its technical goals after nearly two years, finishing with its 65th pass and a round-trip laser link at 218 million miles.
- Ground receivers collected 13.6 terabits in total, including a 267 Mbps ultra-high-definition video sent from over 19 million miles on Dec. 11, 2023.
- The team set a deep-space optical distance mark on Dec. 3, 2024 by downlinking Psyche data from 307 million miles.
- The setup paired a Psyche-mounted laser transceiver with a 3-kilowatt uplink at JPL’s Table Mountain and a 200-inch Palomar telescope as the primary downlink.
- Tests exercised receiver arraying and a retrofitted RF-optical hybrid antenna at DSN Goldstone, while teams managed weather and wildfire disruptions.