NASA Catches Laser Beam From a Spaceship Millions of Miles Away, Finds a Cat Video Inside

Psyche is meant to study the asteroid in the hopes that it is actually the partial core of a planetesimal, one of the early building blocks of an early planet. If that's so, looking at it might give us an answer to many of the questions we still have about our solar system, and that's why Psyche is packed full of instruments: a multispectral imager, a gamma-ray and neutron spectrometer, and a magnetometer.

But the spacecraft also carries with it a number of technology experiments that allow it to conduct unrelated demos along the way – and that's why we keep hearing about it even if it's nowhere near its target yet.

One such technology experiment is the Deep Space Optical Communications (DSOC). We're basically talking about a tool meant to prove once and for all that lasers can be used to send and receive data from very distant spacecraft at a much higher rate than it's currently possible with radio frequency-based comms.

DSOC is a larger system that comprises a powerful modulated laser and a laser transceiver. Data that needs to be sent or received is encoded as bits in the laser's photons, making the method ideal for the transmission of higher-data-rate scientific information, high-definition images, and even high-definition video. It should also be up to 100 times faster than traditional means.

We first got a taste of its capabilities back in November, when Psyche, which for its normal operations relies on a radio comms system, used the laser to send data to decoding gear at the Hale Telescope at the Caltech Palomar Observatory in San Diego, California, from a distance of 10 million miles (16 million km) away - 40 times the distance between Earth and the Moon.

In the time that has passed since November Psyche has been at it several more times, proving to the people working on the project that the laser can transmit data at a rate of 267 Mbps, about as much as broadband internet download speeds - a milestone reached in December 2023 from a distance of 19 million miles (31 million km).

The data sent back to Earth then included digital versions of Arizona State University's Psyche artwork, but also a short, 15-second video showing a cat named Taters – you can see the video, used by NASA as for DSOC testing purposes - below this text.

Psyche is presently at a distance of over 140 million miles (226 million km). At the beginning of the month, the ship once again used the DSOC, integrated for the first time with the onboard radio transmitter, to send data back to Earth. Because the distance is now much greater data transfer speeds have dropped to 25 Mbps, but NASA says that's still well above the goal of proving one Mbps from so far out is possible.

It's unclear at this point what other experiments NASA has planned for the DSOC, but chances are its obvious success will forever change the way spacecraft and even off-world people communicate with Earth. The agency is especially looking at the tech as a potential game changer for missions to Mars.