Ground laser receivers for the Deep Space Optical Communications demonstration: performance and lessons learned from first year of operations

The Deep Space Optical Communication (DSOC) project has concluded its first year of operations, demonstrating high-photon-efficiency downlinks from 163 kbps to 267 Mbps at ranges from 0.1 to 2.7 AU. Here we report on the performance of the primary Ground Laser Receiver (GLR), installed at the Palomar Observatory 5m Hale telescope, as well as the secondary receiver, installed at Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s Optical Communication Telescope Laboratory (OCTL) sharing the 1m aperture with the Ground Laser Transmitter (GLT). We discuss lessons learned from operations, and present results from decoding with the combined (arrayed) counts from multiple receivers.