![\"Illustration](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/Laser-Interferometer-Space-Antenna.jpg\")
Credit: vchal\/istock\/getty images, airbus<\/p>\nSpend any time at all looking up at the night sky, and you\u2019re bound to see some unusual lights appear at some point.<\/p>\n
As any astronomer will attest, the sources of these inevitably turn out to be entirely mundane \u2013 aeroplanes, drones, lights from the Big Top because the circus has come to town, that kind of thing \u2013 but some are a little less mundane than others!<\/p>\n
Credit: vchal\/istock\/getty images, airbus<\/p>\n
Take the unusual lights that appear in this image, for instance.<\/p>\n
What you\u2019re looking at is a picture of the Optical Communications Telescope Laboratory, which is housed at NASA JPL\u2019s Table Mountain Facility in California.<\/p>\n
And the twin beams of light emerging from it aren\u2019t searchlights, as they might first appear \u2013 instead, they\u2019re the proof that a newly developed communications protocol is working as intended.<\/p>\n
![\"Infrared](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/laser-beam-psyche-spacecraft.jpg\")
Infrared image showing the Optical Communications Telescope Laboratory at NASA JPL’s Table Mountain Facility beaming a laser beacon to the DSOC flight laser transceiver aboard NASA’s Psyche spacecraft. Credit: NASA\/JPL-Caltech
\nCommunicating with spacecraft<\/p>\n
This photo was taken as the Laboratory was communicating with NASA\u2019s Psyche spacecraft<\/a>, which was 230 million kilometres (143 million miles) from Earth at the time.<\/p>\n Psyche launched in 2023<\/a> and is on its way to study asteroid 16 Psyche<\/a>, which orbits the Sun between Mars and Jupiter.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n DSOC technology has been developed as an intended replacement for the radio-frequency comms systems currently in use, which are slow and unwieldy.<\/p>\n NASA\u2019s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, for instance, takes 1.5 hours to transmit a single high-resolution image.<\/p>\n 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).<\/p>\n DSOC\u2019s achievements include sending a 15-second HD video \u2013 a preloaded clip of a cat chasing a red laser dot, what else? \u2013 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).<\/p>\n The final experiment was conducted on 2 September, when Psyche sent back data from a distance of 350 million kilometres (218 million miles).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Spend any time at all looking up at the night sky, and you\u2019re bound to see some unusual…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":87671,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[85,46,141,145],"class_list":{"0":"post-87670","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-space","8":"tag-il","9":"tag-israel","10":"tag-science","11":"tag-space"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/87670","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=87670"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/87670\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/87671"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=87670"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=87670"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=87670"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Infrared](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/laser-beam-to-psyche-spacecraft.jpg\")
Credit: NASA\/JPL-Caltech<\/p>\n