Abhijit Biswas and Joseph Kovalik

Two images of Mars: On the right, an early color image of Mars taken in the late 1950s with the 200" Hale Telescope; on the left, an image taken on December 8, 2007 by astrophotographer Dave Tyler using a commercially made 11" schmidt-cassegrain telescope. When Dave took this image, Mars was 56 million miles from Earth. At that distance, it takes more than 4 minutes for a signal to travel from Mars to the Earth. (Palomar Observatory/Caltech, David Tyler)

A NASA pathfinder experiment, DSOC is a communications package that will use near-infrared lasers to transmit data between Earth and distant planetary spacecraft. The goal is to increase communications efficiency by as much as 100% over conventional means.

DSOC will eventually provide the foundation for a communications network around Mars. The first DSOC package is expect to launch 2022 on the Psyche asteroid mission and the 200" Hale Telescope will serve as the ground receiver station for this test.