page_title: Deep Space Optical Communications
section_title: Design
hierarchical_section_title: Deep Space Optical Communications / Design
caption_attribution_description: English: Data rates required for deep space missions in the comming decades.
context_page_description: Deep Space Optical Communications is a laser space communication system in development meant to improve communications performance 10 to 100 times over the current radio frequency technology without incurring increases in mass, volume or power. DSOC will be capable of providing high bandwidth downlinks from beyond cislunar space.
  The project is led by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.
context_section_description: This new technology will employ advanced lasers in the near-infrared region (1.55 µm) of the electromagnetic spectrum. The architecture is based on transmitting a laser beacon from Earth to assist line-of-sight stabilization and pointing back of the downlink laser beam. In addition,  efficient codes are used for error free communications. The system must correct for background noise (scattered light) from Earth's atmosphere and the Sun. The performance of the uplink is expected to be 292 kbit/s at a distance of 0.4 AU. The transmitted beam-width is inversely proportional to the frequency used, so the shorter the wavelength used, the more narrow and focused a beam can be made. The downlink bandwidth will depend on the ground telescope diameter and will be less during daytime.
  Three key DSOC technologies developed for the project include:
  a low-mass spacecraft disturbance isolation and pointing assembly for operating in the presence of spacecraft vibrational disturbance.
  a high-efficiency flight laser transmitter;
  a pair of high-efficiency photon counting detector arrays for the flight optical transceiver and the ground-based receiver (a telescope).
caption: Data rates required for deep space missions in the coming decades
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