Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Space
  3. News

How to watch NASA’s Laser Communications launch early on Monday

Georgina Torbet
By

Update, December 5: The launch has been scrubbed due to a leak in the propellant storage system. It has been rescheduled for Monday, December 6 at 4:04 a.m. ET (12:30 a.m. PT).

NASA’s communication system will soon be getting a serious upgrade, with the launch of the Laser Communications Relay Demonstration (LCRD) set for early tomorrow morning, Monday, December 6. We’ve got the details on the launch and how to watch it live.

Most current NASA missions use radio frequency communications to send data back to Earth. The Perseverance rover, for example, beams data to one of the spacecraft orbiting the planet, which then sends it on to Earth, where it is picked up by the giant dishes of NASA’s Deep Space Network. However, this system has limited bandwidth, and with more and more complex instruments being sent into space, more bandwidth is needed to send communications more efficiently.

Related
Illustration of NASA's Laser Communications Relay Demonstration communicating over laser links.
NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center

The solution is to use a different frequency for communications. Changing over to laser communications (also known as optical communications) will allow a bandwidth increase of between 10 and 100 times that of radio communications. But this change requires new infrastructure, which the LCRD project will test.

“NASA is taking a step toward the next era of space communications with the launch of its Laser Communications Relay Demonstration (LCRD) on Sunday, December. 5,” the agency writes. “Laser communications – also called optical communications because they use light to send information — offer higher data rates than traditional radio frequency systems, enabling more data to be transmitted with each transmission. LCRD will demonstrate space-to-ground laser communications linking ground stations in Hawaii and California. Later in the mission, LCRD will receive and transmit data from an optical terminal that NASA will place on the International Space Station.”

How to watch the LCRD launch

Launch of NASA's Laser Communications Relay Demonstration — LCRD Official Launch Coverage

The relay system will be launched on a United Launch Alliance (ULA) Atlas V rocket from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida, as part of a Space Force mission named Space Test Program 3 (STP-3).

The launch will be livestreamed by NASA on its NASA TV channel. You can watch either by heading to NASA’s website or by using the video player embedded above.

Coverage begins at 3:30 a.m. ET (12:30 a.m. PT) on Monday, December 6, and the two-hour launch window is scheduled to begin at 4:04 a.m. ET (1:04 a.m. PT). If that’s rather too early — or too late! — for you then don’t worry, you can rewatch the event after it’s happened by heading to the NASA YouTube channel.

Editors' Recommendations

Topics
Astronomers share early images from James Webb’s galaxy survey
Images of four example galaxies selected from the first epoch of COSMOS-Web NIRCam observations, highlighting the range of structures that can be seen. In the upper left is a barred spiral galaxy; in the upper right is an example of a gravitational lens, where the mass of the central galaxy is causing the light from a distant galaxy to be stretched into arcs; on the lower left is nearby galaxy displaying shells of material, suggesting it merged with another galaxy in its past; on the lower right is a barred spiral galaxy with several clumps of active star formation.

One of the major aims of the James Webb Space Telescope is to observe some of the earliest galaxies in the universe, and to do that it needs to be able to see extremely distant objects. But looking at a particular very old galaxy in detail is only half of the problem. To truly understand the earliest stages of the universe, astronomers also need to see how these very old galaxies are distributed so they can understand the large-scale structure of the universe.

That's the aim of the COSMOS-Web program, which is using James Webb to survey a wide area of the sky and look for these rare, ancient galaxies. It aims to study up to 1 million galaxies during over 255 hours of observing time, using both Webb's near-infrared camera (NIRCam) and its mid-infrared instrument (MIRI) camera. While there is still plenty of observing left to do, the researchers in the COSMOS-Web program recently shared some of their first results.

Read more
How to watch the Crew-5 mission splash down tonight
The SpaceX Crew-5 members are seated inside the Dragon Endurance crew ship atop the Falcon 9 rocket before launching to the International Space Station from the Kennedy Space Center's Launch Pad 39A in Florida. From left are, Mission Specialist Anna Kikina from Roscosmos; Pilot Josh Cassada and Commander Nicole Mann, both NASA astronauts; and Mission Specialist Koichi Wakata from the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA).

Today a crew of four astronauts left the International Space Station (ISS) and are traveling back to Earth, due to splashdown into the ocean later tonight. The Crew-5 astronauts spent nearly six months living in space and are now due back on solid ground.

NASA Live: Official Stream of NASA TV

Read more
NASA to reveal Artemis II crew for historic lunar trip
The moon and Earth as seen from the Orion spacecraft in November 2022.

NASA will soon reveal the four lucky astronauts that will be sent on a flyby of the moon in the Artemis II mission.

The four crewmembers -- three from NASA and one from the Canadian Space Agency -- will be named on Monday, April 3, NASA chief Bill Nelson announced in a tweet on Thursday.

Read more