The Wrightwood JPL Table Mt. facility got it's 15 minutes of fame.
‘First light’: NASA receives laser-beamed message from 10 million miles away
Ashley Strickland, CNN November 24, 2023 at 12:31 PM
https://www.aol.com/news/first-light-nasa-receives-laser-203128272.htmlAn innovative experiment flying aboard NASA’s Psyche mission just hit its first major milestone by successfully carrying out the most distant demonstration of laser communications. The tech demo could one day help NASA missions probe deeper into space and uncover more discoveries about the origin of the universe.
Sending lasers across space
First light, which occurred on November 14, happened as the flight laser transceiver instrument on Psyche received a laser beacon sent from the Optical Communications Telescope Laboratory at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s Table Mountain Facility near Wrightwood, California.
The initial beacon received by Psyche’s transceiver helped the instrument aim its laser to send data back to the Hale Telescope, which is located about 100 miles (160 kilometers) south of Table Mountain.
“(The November 14) test was the first to fully incorporate the ground assets and flight transceiver, requiring the DSOC and Psyche operations teams to work in tandem,” said Meera Srinivasan, operations lead for DSOC at JPL, located in Pasadena, California, in a statement. “It was a formidable challenge, and we have a lot more work to do, but for a short time, we were able to transmit, receive, and decode some data.”
The DSOC ground laser transmitter operators were on site at the Optical Communications Telescope Laboratory at JPL's Table Mountain Facility near Wrightwood, California, for the first experiment. - NASA/JPL-Caltech
It’s not the first time laser communications have been tested in space. The first test of two-way laser communication occurred in December 2021 when NASA’s Laser Communications Relay Demonstration launched and went into orbit about 22,000 miles (35,406 kilometers) from Earth. ....
