Timelapse of JPL's Table Mountain Facility Beaming Laser Beacon to Psyche

Click here for animation (.mp4, 58 MB)

This timelapse video shows the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory's Table Mountain Facility near Wrightwood, California, transmitting its 3-kilowatt laser beacon to the agency's Deep Space Optical Communications (DSOC) experiment aboard NASA's Psyche mission on June 2, 2025; the spacecraft was about 143 million miles (230 million kilometers) from Earth at the time.

Managed by JPL, DSOC was designed to demonstrate that data encoded in laser photons could be reliably transmitted, received, and then decoded after traveling millions of miles from Earth out to Mars distances. Nearly two years after launching aboard the agency's Psyche mission in 2023, the demonstration completed its 65th and final "pass" on Sept. 2, 2025, sending a laser signal to Psyche and receiving the return signal from 218 million miles (350 million kilometers) away.

Caltech manages JPL for NASA. This demonstration is the latest in a series of optical communication experiments funded by the Space Technology Mission Directorate's Technology Demonstration Missions Program managed at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, and the agency's SCaN (Space Communications and Navigation) program in the Space Operations Mission Directorate. The Psyche mission is led by Arizona State University. Lindy Elkins-Tanton of the University of California, Berkeley is the principal investigator. A division of Caltech in Pasadena, JPL is responsible for the mission's overall management.

To learn more about the laser communications demo, visit:

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/missions/deep-space-optical-communications-dsoc/