Lasers in Space! How NASA’s New Technology Could Revolutionize Deep Space Comms (Live Public Talk)

Lasers in Space! How NASA’s New Technology Could Revolutionize Deep Space Comms (Live Public Talk)

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hi and welcome to this edition of the Von Carman series I'm Nikki wck from jpl's Communications and education directorate and it is an honored to be your host for our talk lasers in space how NASA's new technology could revolutionize deep space Communications the deep space Optical Communications or doo experiment is a technology demonstration that uses lasers for communication and was launched aboard NASA psyche mission in October of 2023 it is successfully transmitted data using laser Communications for the first time beyond the moon and more recently from Mars orbit although the Milestones of dock are new use of optical Communications has been around for some time we'll talk more about how this is revolutionizing deep space communication but first let's meet our co-host bringing us your viewer questions coming to us live from the home of NASA's deep space Network and jpl's space flight operations facility is Dr Ian O'Neal JPL media relations specialist hi Ian hey Nikki yeah I just wanted to uh uh remind you that as we chat about this awesome new space technology that NASA is your space agency so we want you to be involved in the conversation so if you're watching on YouTube LinkedIn x.com be sure to leave your questions for Angel and Joe in the chat um and our awesome uh social media team will jump to your questions hope you bring them into the conversation um but but if the uh the chat box doesn't appear as it sometimes does make sure you refresh your page and it should appear um to learn more about dieso and Optical Communications after tonight's conversation check out the link on your screen go. nasa.gov deso bye to you Nikki thanks Ian we're so glad you're here today with us we'll come back to you for a bit for those viewer questions and as a reminder to our audience all of you watching if we do run in into any technical difficulties please be patient with us and stick with us we will get them sorted out as soon as we can so now let's meet our two speakers for this discussion Dr Joseph kovalik Doo flight integration and test lead hi Joe hi Nikki nice nice to be here thanks for being with us and our second speaker Dr Angel e Velasco Doo ground laser transmitter lead hi Angel hi Nikki how are you great it's great to have both of you with us uh for our conversation tonight we're actually going to start with Angel so angel what is deep space Optical Communications yeah so the doo or project is a it's a culmination of many decades of work um that is trying to show that the technology needed to do deep space Optical Communications works that's pretty much it so you know for the past you know over 40 years a lot of researchers around the world have been developing technology to be able to shoot lasers and send data out into deep space and when I me meant deep space I mean beyond the moon right I'm talking about Mars distances this is you know over 270 Million Miles Away right and so once you kind of go beyond the moon you know the the requirements to be able to do such technology gets pretty hard and so you know we've reached a point now where we have the technology we have better lasers better telescopes better cameras and so uh you know now we have the opportunity to kind of really showcase um that technology and so you know Doo is a part of the psyche Mission which launched by a year ago currently psyche is you know uh about you know 3 Au and Au is a distance from Earth to the mo uh Earth to the sun which is 90 million miles and so it's out there and we're performing links which means we're sending data up and down up to the terminal and back down to earth on a weekly basis um and so if you show go to uh slide one please so yeah so DOA comprises of three parts there's a two ground terminals which transmits signal up to the terminal aboard the psyche spacecraft uh that uses the Uplink to kind of lock on and know where Earth is it then points the 4wt laser aboard the psyche spacecraft to a ground receiver uh at the at the Palomar Observatory and so these three components kind of comprises of the do uh project so for each station new technology had to be developed in order for this link to work and so DOA kind of offers a very unique opportunity to kind of be the first to be able to do operations uh and to show how it can be done and be able to support for uh future missions you know why you know do we need uh Optical Communications well um it offers 10 to 100 times uh more data rates or faster data rates compared to the standard technology that's being used today which is the RF or radio frequency technology um it's RF is great it's wonderful um but Optical is meant to kind of complement that technology so that they're meant to work hand inand together right RF is stable very mature Optical provides much faster data rates that you know scientists and future missions I think would love to have to kind of get the data rate down and you talked about the complement of RF and Optical Communications if we pull up graphic number three you can actually see both of those on the psyche spacecraft right Angel that's right so uh so you see here there's the uh actually could we start with a slide two if that's possible I think it's a really cool shot yeah there there is thank you so so here you see the flight uh terminal which is a 22 cm aperture you see the mirror at the very top there that the flight terminal is not very very big it's you know like this big u in size and so that's currently is what's sitting out in deep space on the psyche uh spacecraft and so that H you know if you see in the lower right picture there you see the top open it has all the bearers inside uh there's a laser that you can't see and then camera on the back there but that's effectively the flight terminal um that's aboard psyche uh spacecraft now if you go to slide three please uh you see there it's now mounted aboard the psyche spacecraft this was before launch of course um and so you see the the the little terminals not that big it's m on the side you see the kind of the silver tube that's just to kind of block out the sun and a cap and a cover on the front to protect it but that's open during operations obviously and then just kind of for scale you know kind of what we're working uh uh you know with is the RF component the RF antenna which is large kind of meter few meter size antenna right next to kind of silver cone there um so you can kind of see the scale of the optical terminal versus the RF and both are you know the hope is that they'll work together um out in deep space great now we've got a good idea about dock but Joe can you tell us more what is Optical communication so Optical Communications is Communications using light so if we can have slide number four you can see what we call the electromagnetic spectrum and it goes all the way from radio waves which are long wavelength low frequency to you know x-rays gamma rays which are very short wavelengths and very high frequency we're using light and we actually don't use visible light so visible light is light that you can see we use infrared light now infrared light you can feel so it feels warm like the sun puts a lot of infrared light and that's what you feel from the Sun um why do we use visible light or why do we use light the reason we use light is that as I said um radio waves have low frequency light has has higher frequency with higher frequency we can effectively send a higher data rate so if you look at the next slide that we have Slide Five you can see uh sort of a graphic of what happens with the radio wave on the light on the left and the optical waves on the right and you can see that I send a certain amount of data down with the radio but with the optical I send much more data and that's what we're hoping to do but the other reason we use uh laser is because because the wavelength is shorter what happens is we can send a much short a much uh more focused beam so it's a much tighter beam and because of that we can concentrate the energy more and we can also get more information by doing that um the other thing is because it's uh shorter wavelength we can use smaller uh systems to transmit to light so as angel said we use a 22 cm aperture rather than a few meter aperture so we can get uh more information with a smaller aperture and people in spacecraft like having things that are smaller weigh less and take up less room um Joe this isn't the first use of optical Communications but Doo is the first deep space use of this past the moon where else have Optical Communications been used in space so if we can have slide six so here was one experiment this was done from a low two experiments actually done from a low earth orbit now low earth orbit the satellite is going around the earth quite quickly so we can only see it Go by us for maybe about 10 minutes from from when it rises above the Horizon to when it sets and here are two experiments one was uh oets which was done by the Japanese Space Agency on a European Space Agency satellite and the other one was Opals that was done from uh the space station and these were all down links done to our ground station uh jpl's ground station at Table Mountain the next slide so here is uh longer distance this is uh lcrd which stands for the laser Communications relay demonstration and this satellite is at uh a geostationary orbit which means that it always stays at the same position in the sky from where we're looking at in the ground and um that has uh very nice sort of synergies with regular Communication in that when we use radio frequency uh Communications we have geostationary satellites and so we're trying to do the same thing now with a uh laser system next slide so going further out into space this was the llcd which is the laser lunar Comm Communications demonstration and this was done from a satellite that was orbiting the moon down to earth and so what Doo does is it's taking us so we've progressed now from low earth orbit to geostationary which is further out all the way to the moon and now deep space is taking us much much further out I mean clearly we've got a good history uh so far there's actually been quite a few questions in the chat so I want to throw it back to Ian for some questions from the audience maybe let's take two yeah interesting stuff um yeah we got some great questions coming in at the moment um Sam d11 on YouTube asks is laser Optical communication faster than radio signals and what limitations is Doo subject to and I think that can probably go to Joe so that's a good question because people get confused when we say higher data rate so both radio waves and light waves travel at the speed of light that's uh that's fixed what the optical does is it lets us send more volume so in in a given amount of so if I send out you can think a packet of information from far away it takes the same amount of time for that packet to arrive at the Earth but I can send a bigger packet over the light wave than I can over the radio wave and the limitations are are sort of like the standard limitations you have for any communication system it's how much power I can transmit and that then is related to uh how narrow a beam I can send um it's also how well I can point the spacecraft and these are all things that are taken into consideration of the design right now we are uh using Doo to sort of measure the performance and for the Next Generation we can optimize the design based on what we learn great stuff um and I suppose this is kind of related and this can go to Angel um my favorite martian on X asks is deep space laser communication affected by the curvature of space and gravitational lensing that's a that's that's a very good question so uh gravitational lensing is if there's 's a a large body of mass kind of between the The Observer and the source right and so that you know as a start you're probably thinking of a Starlight as it goes through a black hole or past a black hole it'll kind of curve and and kind of appear as if there's two images but with the deep space Optical Comm you know we don't really have large you know masses gravitational sources of mass out there in the solar system so fortunately we don't have to kind of deal with that at the moment good avoid it because we're not doing it just yet I like that answer um so we're going to jump back into some more questions with Angel but please keep asking your questions in the chat we'll come back to you a little bit later thank you Ian uh angel can you tell us more about the specifics of how Doo Works uh yeah so uh you know let's kind of start where when theog started it's uh let's pull up slide nine please um so like I said psyche or doog is a payload on the Psyche termin on the psyche spacecraft psyche launched uh a little less than a year ago back on Friday the 13th October 2023 so launched successfully and psyche has a six-year Mission uh out or six-year Cruise phase where it has to before it reaches psyche the asteroid Doo is uh main mission is during the first two years of of the six years and so what doog um is effectively doing is once a week uh we'll turn on our lasers and then just transmit data uh up and down to with the with with the terminal on the psyche spacecraft uh just kind of testing you know different data rates different you know conditions uh just so we can understand uh the SS better and ultimately what we're trying to do is really um you know kind of compare you know the experiment with the you know with the theory right this is kind of where the rubber hits the road where we're finally you know we are the first mission to kind of go beyond the moon to kind of really demonstrate these links and so it's kind of awesome to see data kind of come in and just really um uh sync up with what we're seeing here so if we can go to slide uh the next slide please 10 and so uh like I said earlier doog is is composed of three three parts there's two on the ground and one out on psyche and so uh we have to have a transmitter uh to send signal up that's at the ground laser transmitter at the table Mount facility that's behind us in the San Gabriel mountains that has a 1 meter aperture telescope uh which is about 3 feet wide that sends out uh about you know 3 to five kilowatts of laser power at 1064 nanometers so that's in the infrared so you can't see that's invisible to the eye we shoot that we need that much Powers because Psych is so far away you know right now it's over 270 Million Miles Away by the time it gets there uh the signal is so faint but we have some special camera on the flight terminal that sees it locks onto it it psyche the terminal then uses that as a pointing reference to know where to point uh to the receiver and so then it directs its laser it's four WT laser it only has four watts of laser power and then it then sends you know goes through space before it hits the receiver at the Palmar Observatory and there we have a giant 5 meter telescope uh with the hail telescope that receives all those faint bits of photons from deep space and then we have a receiver that then decodes the messages and you know gets back pictures videos you know whatever we sent down that's also using in combination with the RF uh component so we can at the same time as sending Optical Communications we can also do RF which is received by the deep space Network and then we also have the mission Operation Center at JPL which kind of coordinates the whole thing um there so what has Doo accomplished so far yeah so the um we can pull up the next slid please um yeah so NASA you know had how how we kind of Define the success for NASA is you know we have four four criteria here these are kind of very general one we had to demonstrate that the all the hardware worked on Earth before launch so we made sure we we did a whole bunch of tests just to satisfy that yep we think everything's going to work so that was done the other two which was kind of after launch was meant to show that we could in fact send data on the Uplink up to the satellite and on the down link back to Earth and so these uh these requirements were dependent on how far away uh psyche was and so you know when you know we kind of the the yard stick that we use is Mars right cuz you know ultimately we want to use a a future deep space Optical comp terminal for a Mars mission you know to support maybe astronauts going to Mars or you know some or maybe to the Moon right um and so um you know so we we defined certain requirements so at you know Mars closest range which is at 37 Au um or about 35 million miles um the the you know we we were able to do about 267 megabits per second which is comparable to what you get here on your home internet at home but now you know weid it over tens of Million Miles Away and then when Mars is the furthest from Earth uh there we were able to do 8 megabits per second which is still u 10 times better than what the RF can do the last check mark that we can do that we need to kind of check off is to you know it's great that the technology Works um but it also needs to last right and so you know to able to support future missions you know being able to last more than a year uh is is very beneficial so that's the last one that we're going to check off uh which is going to happen on November 4th so couple weeks you know we're hoping to check off the last one and that'll be official success but you the overarching you know point of Doo is that you know we really want to convey that it it works you know it a lot of Decades of people thinking about it you know studying it developing technology and it's it's awesome to kind of finally get to the point where we can tell everyone yep it it works and you know it can be used for future missions and Angel for your first big test of dock the team had pre-loaded a video on the spacecraft that was transmitted to Earth can you tell us about this successful transm Mission yeah this actually happened back in December um so before launch we uh you know we uploaded a number of videos and images onto the spacecraft um just to have on on memory before launch um we didn't send the cat to space I just want to clarify that you know these are just videos of cat of a cat but if you can show the video now please so this is ters uh he's an orange tabby uh he was this video was designed by The Design Lab here at JPL kudos to them uh you know they knew that the people of Earth love cats and so a cat video was made put together and this is what we were downloaded at you know 267 megabits per second from deep space so it's it's I don't know if it's fitting but you know the first deep space video is of a cat so um you you know there's other Graphics you see psyche's trajectory there you see you know some observatories but um we it was just kind of a fun video to to demonstrate that what it can do you know ultimately you know we would want this for future astronauts to be able to download highdefinition videos of them you know or maybe highdefinition videos of Mars down to earth right to have sound and video would be a huge uh you know win for for NASA absolutely and as angel said taters the cat was not sent to space safe here on Earth but the video was transmitted uh so taters safe here on Earth uh Angel tell us what does a day of operations look like for Doo uh yeah so so let's go to the next slide please perfect thank you so uh you know it's you know there's it takes a lot of work as you can imagine for any Mission we have three teams three primary teams plus an operations team that's the JPL so we have a flight team that just manages the flight terminal so for actually work for them before you know operation starts two weeks before you know so everything on the flight terminal is pre-sequence we can't change anything they write the sequences of you know what's going to happen at what time it's tested we have a replica of our Doo terminal here at JPL that we then test to make sure it all works out and then that then is uploaded to the flight terminal and it's ready and once the clock hits it starts running on the receiver side uh at the palar you see we have to um you know pointing is a huge you know factor in in Optical C right we have you know as Joe said we have very narrow beans and we're trying to hit targets very far away you know it's effectively trying to hit like your cell phone about a mile away you know that's what we have to do every single time and so requires you know calibrating our telescopes to kind of ensure that pointing accuracy and then Palomar you know in order to be able to detect these little bits of faint signals coming from deep space we have to have a special cryogenic uh detector that has to be cool and near absolute zero temperature and then we also have to have a receiver uh that then kind of decodes things in real time to kind of you know handle any any disturbances from you know the atmosphere and so that needs to be preped preped before it pass and then at the ground laser transmitter at at Table Mountain you know we're transmitting kilowatts of laser out into space right so you know we have to make sure that our our mirrors can handle it so we clean we have to make sure that we don't hit airplanes you know they we're next to La so LAX is run ex us so there's tons of airplanes and satellites that fly over us so we have to turn off the laser every single time it passes by so these three themes need to work together during an operation so that we can continuously have a laser that transmits to psyche and then psyche can then receive it uh back down to earth and so these passes are you know about 2 to 8 hours long each so it's just 2 to 8 hours of just a laser just constantly going up and a laser constantly coming down and kind of what makes um you know the the operations a little bit more complex um is that you know we have like Joe said a finite speed of light right so we send something up but psyche is so far away it takes right now about 25 minutes just to get there and then it takes another 25 minutes for it to come back so whatever we do on the trm when we send up we don't know what happens on the receiver until 50 minutes later and so that requires us kind of you know understanding you know uh um just keeping that and and and during our operations so folks online have been asking a ton of questions Ian I want to throw it back to you for a couple of those what are they asking um yeah I just want to say the taters video or ters video depending on which side of the Atlanta you come from um was one of my favorite things to work on at uh JPL so yeah kudos to The Design Lab team they did a great job on that um okay so we actually have a question kind of related to what you just said Angel um we have a question from uh M Mt Anu sorry if I'm butchering that on LinkedIn uh what power does such laser have so I suppose what how powerful is the Uplink laser and how powerful is the downlink laser uh yeah that's that's a good question so on the Uplink we have it's actually a tunable laser so we have uh eight lasers but total power that can be transmitted you know from few 300 watts total power up to about 7 kilow we can really kind of crank up the laser too so that's on the up link on the down link from psyche back down to earth uh it's a 4 WT laser but again that's tunable so we can tune it from two Watts you know one a half a watt up to about four Watts so for the first half of the mission we were at two Watts wow very cool stuff and um I've got a question I've actually been pondering for a while now and this is probably a good one for for Joe um James web discoveries on LinkedIn asks how does the dox system mitigate the effects of space weather or Cosmic interference such as soda flares or radiation which could potentially disrupt the laser communication signal so the solar radiation part sort of particle radiation you're talking about doesn't really uh affect us what it does affect though however is the flight Electronics so it can damage the flight electronics and also our our lasers on the spacecraft it's a fiber based laser so there made it uses fiber optics inside it and the fiber optics can get damaged by the radiation too so these are things that we actually worried about and a lot of research was done for example to come up with the right kind of fiber that doesn't get damaged by solar flare radiation great stuff thanks Ian and Joe I actually have a follow-up question sort of along the same lines um that particular question was talking about space challenges but what are some of the challenges of there and Optical Communications and how do you overcome them okay so as I said this is Optical communication and as we know when we have clouds uh the optical communication doesn't work the clouds block the laser beam from going through so if we have clouds we can't do Optical Communications there's a challenge so if you look at slide 14 you can see what the sky looks up above uh Table Mountain and Palomar so are transmit and receive and and there's a day that's cloudy we're probably not going to get good Optical Communications if you look at the next slide people have done studies as to how often we have clouds how thick they are can they really uh block the laser beam and you'll see that so 50% of the time we actually have pretty good uh clear skides and then another uh over 30% of the time we have thin overhead clouds so depending on how thin they are and where they are we can sometimes even get the laser beams through that so the atmosphere is is one of our big challenges and as you know if you ever look at stars stars twinkle now uh you know the sun is a star and we know the sun doesn't twinkle I mean the sun doesn't turn on and off so why why is the light turning on and off it's because the atmosphere and so laser beams going through the atmosphere have the same effect and that of course affects our ability to uh communicate because having the laser beam turn on and off means that we can't transmit information when the laser beam's off so we have to come up with ways to deal with that one of the ways we deal with that is by by trying to have less Atmosphere by putting our telescopes up on top of mountains just like astronomers do so for example you know if you're in LA and you're in the springtime and you get a nice Marine layer and you see nothing but fog you're at Table Mountain it's clear skies so another challenge is because we're using optical we have to use optical telescopes and uh radio frequency telescopes you see them everywhere they're they're big um they're you know they're Left Outside in the Rain they're you uh people don't worry so much about uh damage to them uh optical telescopes you know made of glass they have to be finely polished and have very good coatings on them to be able to reflect the laser light and so they need to be treated with a lot more care so the terms of a facility it's a lot harder to build it it's a lot harder to build a big mirror that is of good quality compared to a big radio telescope and and the other challenge of course is that there's just not that many telescopes available to do Optical Communications to do a deep space Optical Communications we'd like as big a telescope as we can get so we use 5 meter Palomar we'd actually like to use 10m telescopes uh there's just not that many 10 met telescopes around to use it and uh even then if we we have the telescopes we need an infrastructure to go to the telescope so if we want to transmit High rate data down from space we have to get it off the mountain so not only do we have to put the telescope on the mountain but we have to put a good fiber optic connection to get that uh information from the telescope to uh to where to where we want uh where we want it yeah Joe I know you spent some time up a table mountain and so has Angel thankfully it's a driveway from JPL but one thing we haven't gotten to discuss is this percep that Optical Communications is new but Joe this technology has been used in conjunction with radio communications even here on Earth right yes so um you know most youve probably heard of optical fibers so um fi or F fiber networks and uh what you do in that is you take a laser beam and you transmit it through a a thin fiber of glass and many of the techniques that are used there we use except instead of setting them through thin fibers of glass we set them through free space and uh so you think of a typical communication Network we have here on Earth we use our cell phones our cell phones use radio frequencies to go to a cell phone tower uh the cell phone tower it most likely has a fiber optic uh F cable to it that goes to some data center and so we're taking uh from our hands we're taking a radio frequency signal to uh antenna and that antenna then transmits changes it to a light signal that then goes to the data center so it's it's using light to do communication is not new it's been around for a long time thanks Joe Ian you've got a ton more questions so I want to give another chance to our viewers go for it yeah we'll try and get through as many of these as possible but yeah they they keep on coming but they're really good questions so we'll try and uh get to most of them um okay so we have a question from uh Tin Man on YouTube uh will you be transmitting multiple light wavelengths simultaneously or just a single wavelength as only infrared U that's a pretty good question um I think that can go to go to Angel well why why infrared I suppose is the question yeah so infrared has uh you know there the you know first why infrared the atmosphere has certain windows that we can transmit without severe attenuations and so those happen to be at you know in the infrared 1064 1550 or just a couple of them um so that's kind of one one of the reasons why we move towards that region and it's also due to background of the sun right the sun you know is is is a huge emitter of of Optical wavelength and you know kind of the peak is right around the visible so that also introduces a lot of background that you know you're trying to see a very faint signal among a lot of background that's not good right so if you kind of move further into the IR you know you have a nice window for the for transmission through the atmosphere through the air um and then also kind of lower uh background background noise just due to the sun um and to your question about you know M you know using multiple wavelength that's that's a that's a great question uh so for Doo we we use just uh a single wavelength effectively um you know that's just how the you know the technology works but yeah you know using multiple wavelengths is actually a way people do uh um send higher data rates uh by you know using a lot of different wavelength so yes very cool thank you and we have another question uh from nerds Like Us on YouTube um what is the maximum distance space lasers can transmit information that's a good one I suppose that can go to Joe so uh so the way to look at this is I'm sending a laser beam into space and a laser beam even though it's doesn't spread as as much as you think you know a regular uh Light Beam does they do does spread as it goes out in space so the further out you get the more it spreads and that mean the signal gets weaker and at some point it gets so weak we can't detect it so uh one one way we get around that is instead of trying to do a high data rate we do a lower data rate because we can do lower data with less power but at some point Runs Out we've studied uh emissions to go all the way up to Uranus and Neptune so hopefully you know in the future we'll be able to get that far and that is something I wanted to discuss too with Angel we're talking about you know all of the possibilities for optical Communications but Angel what is next for Doo yeah so you know Doo started about last November and and about July of this year uh we enter what we we call solar conjunction so psyche is now moving kind of close to Sun and around it and that uh just kind of limits our our ability to to to do links with it and so that kind of defined the first half of of dies so there we were able to you know uh kind of work out operations work out the bugs we were able to meet most of our requirements uh you know meet these you know the 267 megabits per second all that data rate so uh after conjunction after solo conjunction in December uh we're GNA kind of psyche uh before was moving further from Earth psyche is going to start coming back to Earth as just part of its natural trajectory and so we're actually going to start uh repeating a lot of The Links at the same distances um what's going to be kind of interesting now is you know we we actually can uh have the ability to turn up the power so originally we were the first half we were at two watts of laser power on the down link now we're going to go up to four watts of laser power as well as explore some new data rates so doing that will allow us to kind of increase uh even kind of bump up more higher data rates uh uh at at at far distances so that's going to be exciting to kind of you know try to break our own records uh per se from the first half um the the second half um is to uh kind of start you know we we have U there's other interests around the world right so to to kind of you know have a a future for for deep space Optical Cal for for you know any Mission uh we'll need you know multiple ground sites all around the world similar to the DSN which if is for the RF and so Issa actually has if we can pull up slide 16 please um Issa has has shown interest and actually building up uh kind of their own Ground Terminal to support a deep space mission So currently they're building a ground laser transmitter at uh I forget the name I will not try to say it to offend anyone but it's in Greece and then the receiver is at helmos which is uh you know within also Greece as well um and so they're they're apply to transmit and be able to receive as well and the hope is that by uh summer of 2025 um they'll be ready and be able to actually close links with our Doo flight terminal on board psyche so that's going to be exciting um when when that time comes looks like a bright future for Doo but Joe what does the future hold for this technology of optical Communications so in some sense the the future is now uh right now there are uh satellite networks that use lasers to communicate so the individual satellites communicate with each other using lasers so uh that's that's Comm something that's being done commercially but in terms of s sort of more what NASA cares about uh the Orion emission which is going to have astronauts on it there is going to be a laser terminal on that Space Capsule and from that uh so this is going to the moon and so from that Space Capsule we'll be able to have astronauts give us live highdefinition video so no more grainy black and white from the moon but high definition color video fantastic we're looking forward to that uh then you can think more in the future of if we have a another Mars mission we can put a high definition video camera there and we'll actually be able to take High defition video of uh solar of the dust storms that we get on Mars right now we can only take individual pictures and slowly send each picture back to Earth and try to piece something together but now we'll have live video but even more exciting is that uh currently when people design instruments for deep space missions they're given a certain amount of data that they're allowed to transmit and that's limited by by the radio frequency communication systems they use now with this we can give people maybe 10 100 times uh more data available that they can send so people will be able to design instruments to do a lot more complicated experiments uh take a lot more data and hopefully discover new things and that's what we're really hope looking forward to and we can see an artist rendition of what Joe was talking about these human missions like emis is oion in the next graphic so if we could pull that up please that just kind of gives us an idea of what Joe was talking about there not just for humans going to space and potentially using this technology but also like Joe was saying for those new types of instruments as well um but I want to talk to both of you you have mentioned a lot of great information about Doo but one thing that I know really matters to you both is the amount of team effort that goes into this incredible technology demonstration so Joe let's start with you and let's bring up the next graphic to kind of show the folks at home that team that we're talking about so Doo is is sort of a unique uh space terminal it has lasers on it it has uh Optics it both transmits and receives light it's got uh Communications interfaces high high data Communications interfaces it's got very very good pointing control systems in it and these things are all put together on something that has to go into deep space and survive the environment of deep space and this is something you know where it took a team of a lot of people you have experts in all these different disciplines to come together and and make this happen and and one of the particular challenges for Doo was that just when the flight Hardware started to arrive and had to be assembled and tested was when Co struck and and as you can realize we cannot uh do that work from home we had to come into to work and find a way to do it and we managed and succeeded in delivering the hardware in time and Angel you've talked a lot about operations how has your teamwork been with the team yeah so the you know this is an amazing team um you know as you can imagine when you do kind of a one-of aind or you know I'm sorry not one of a kind a first OFA kind Tech demo it requires a lot of experts you know working closely together long hours you know these a lot of these passes or all of these passes were you know in the night some you know right in the middle of the night um you know we had to travel to observatories you know the teams were separated so it just uh required a lot of coordination a lot of teamwork um to kind of make this work and you know because of everyone's effort this is you know these are just a few pictures a few of the people but you know a lot of people aren't shown here uh that was able to kind of get us to this point and makes do a success and so you know many kudos to them U for all their hard work uh and yeah many kudos to the team and to both of you for the amount of time you've put into this incredible technology demonst ation um so I want to hand it over to Ian for any last questions I know we're not going to get to all of our audience questions but Ian what are some more of the questions they're asking out there today yeah thank you Nikki yes some more good ones um this was this is a an interesting question I haven't actually thought of um but Nicholas Hilton on YouTube asks Optical and radio communications sorry Optical and radio observatories are increasingly suffering from noise pollution could the infrared laser be subject to a issue is lasers are increasingly used in Earth orbiting satellites and I suppose actually that probably go for to Joe so uh in some sense we're we we're a little bit uh immune to interference because we use very specific wavelengths that's one of the reasons we use lasers is that we can get a very very narrow wavelength of light and we can filter out uh the the other wavelengths that we don't want but um you know right now there really isn't a so for radio waves there's an International Convention to assign specific frequencies to specific people for uh lasers we don't really have that yet so in the future we may have to you know come up with the same kind of intervent International Convention so that we assign specific frequencies to or wavelengths to people and they they use them so we don't interfere with one another fantastic thank you um and Angel touched on this question um during his presentation but we had a couple of questions considering the safety process so Paula on uh LinkedIn asks is there any specific safety process that you need to follow before turning the laser on each time and related to that d d on YouTube asks what would happen if the laser hit a plane or something else that's that's I think that's a good one for Angel yeah uh right so every single time I'll the first is you know what do we do be you know before turning on the laser so uh you know safety is the utmost for the doo project you know we we have check and triple check all of our measures before turning on these lasers as you know you shouldn't be shooting lasers you know even laser pointers into the sky right it's a dangerous thing um so you know we do have to go through uh kind of a routine to clean all of our Optics because even you know uh some dust that settles on one of our mirrors could kind of instigate a failure of of the coating and that would be detrimental so we really really try to keep our Optics clean um we then also have a dedicated uh what we call Laser safety system um that was developed in house here at JPL um these don't exist um that actually kind of monitors airplanes out in space while we're transmit a laser and if it detects any any airplane that thinks it'll cross the laser it'll actually shut the laser off automatically to let the airplane pass and then it'll turn on again and will kind of keep transmitting um and this is also done for uh satellite as well cuz we don't want to illuminate an uh another foreign satellite and cause an international incident so we really try to avoid illumination um using this this this system now um the the the the other question uh which was forget oh um if um if it like aircraft considerations uh oh oh if we I think if we illuminated an aircraft what would happen to the aircraft uh that's a very good question uh you know we've done lots of calculations and the answer it's it's a little bit unclear we we you know ultimately what we think is the biggest concern is uh the safety actually of the passengers you know because the airplane is moving so fast relative to the beam that actually exposure to the laser is is you know to actually inflict damage to the airplane is is is very unlikely um but what could potentially happen is you you know someone could be looking at the window right down at you know the laser beam right at the wrong time and could get illuminated and now they may have some eye damage uh and that would be considerably bad if it was a pilot uh right because then the whole airplane could be in danger and so um you know it's it's a low likelihood of all these kind of meeting you know kind of lining up but you know because of that we really just take Ultra precaution of don't even try eliminate an airplane we just turn it off and let the airplane fly by thank you um and I have a um like an encryption question I think um from uh G hillerton on YouTube um are there any are there also cryptographic challenges connected to Doo and I suppose for laser Communications in general so Joe do you have a answer for that so uh so let's separate cryptographic from encoding so you know in cryptographic we're we're trying to take the data information and change it in a way that no one else can read it uh we're not really worried about that right now for what we're doing what we have to do though is we have to take the data and encode it so you think how do we send the information so what we're really doing is we're taking the laser and we're turning it on and off very very quickly and then we we look to see if we see a pulse if we see a pulse we we say it's oh it's on we see no pulse it's off and from that we can actually recreate uh the information stream that we want and that's that's one that's sort of an encoding scheme but then we have to come up with ways of taking that data and mixing it together so that if we ever miss a pulse we can we know okay we missed a pulse so uh there's an error there we have to correct it and that's called error correction so we do that too and that's one of the ways we're able to actually uh send data error free even though there are errors in it we we correct for the errors that occur in the transmission from things for example like the light Fades or or the the telescope off points a little bit and we have less power perfect good stuff and um I know we're coming to the end of our uh Q&A now so I just had um one question for both of you we'll start with Angel um how did you get into this career and you know what advice would you give other people to follow this career path oh yeah um you know it's uh you know it's a number of steps right that you kind of to get to get to this point you know for me it was you know I've always loved science I've always loved kind of the physics of of things and you know building things to me you know is is the greatest thing that anyone can do um and so you know just kind of you know working through you know getting the grades in you know in school and then ultimately trying to supplement that with actual Hands-On skills right you know work in the lab you know get an internship here at JPL there's a cool very good internship program that you can apply to um it just kind of get your foot in the door and and you know trying to get real experience in this field right something related to J what JPL does right right um or at some other NASA Center depending on where you want to go and then just you know using the marriage of this you know good grades and and kind of getting your foot in the door uh with real hands-on experience is kind of you know you know kind of how how you know you can get a career in this and you know ultimately you know just you know for me you got to love what you do right because with here you know you since you're doing first you know first of a Kind kind of things um you know you you work a lot of long hours and but you know it's it's a joy to kind of see things finally work so amazing uh same question to Joe so I've always wanted to know how things work and in a very fundamental way how things work so I uh was interested in physics because physics is sort of the basis of how everything works and so I studied physics and I I went to University studied physics I went to graduate school and studied physics again and there I worked on a project that uses laser beams to uh to measure very very small distances laser interferometry so that's how I got involved D with lasers and then eventually um I saw this opportunity to get a job at JPL and I've always been interested working at JPL and the nice thing about this project doing laser Communications is that it involves a lot of the things you learn in physics so we have to know about lasers we have to know about Optics we have to know about uh how detectors work we have to know theory of information how how information is is coded and uh then we have to know things like pointing how to build control system systems to point things very well so you know with a physics background uh we sort of understand all these different things can put them together to build something so that that really makes this uh interesting for me and and how how do how what advice would I give people who want to follow a career in in science or engineering uh find find something you like you enjoy to do and and then study it and and then when you're studying it get involved by talking to other people there so you know talk to your professors or talk to other students and try to get as much information you can of opportuni so say you tell people I really would like to work in the lab and do something and you know maybe there's a position in the lab where uh they can't even pay you but you'll go there and you'll learn something and then from that you'll learn enough that you can get a better position so try very hard to uh reach out to people and find out how they can help you do what you want to and when you do that you'll find that a lot of people are really excited about their work and and are excited to see someone who's excited about their work and uh they'll take you on and uh you'll be able to move forward with your career amazing thank you so much Joe and before I hand you back to back to you Nikki I just want to mention you probably heard some background chatter um we're very lucky to um be in the mission control um uh for this uh for this one Carmen uh lecture and as you can see it's a very active environment and we've got controllers sending live commands right now to our three uh complexes for the deep space Network and of course they're continuously communicating with uh dozens of of spacecraft and deep space right now via radio communications so hopefully in the future we'll have a component of laser Communications here as well so thank you both so much for all your answers and thank you so much to all our our viewers who sent some great questions you Nikki great questions thank you Ian and unfortunately that is all the time we have for today remember if you want to find out more about Doo and updates on the next phase of this experiment please visit the link on the bottom of your screen go. NASA .gv

sdock I want to thank our speakers Angel and Joe for joining us to chat about Doo and also thank you to Ian for doing a great job a special thanks go out to the incredible team behind the scenes that make all of this possible and to you our viewers for joining us each month it is truly an honor to bring the incredible work of JPL to you each and every month and please do join us next month as we discuss anomalies with the Voyager spacecraft thanks again and we will see you in November bye everybody [Music]

2024-10-18 17:51

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