The signal travelled 460 million kilometres - roughly the same distance between Earth and Mars when the two planets are farthest apart
NASA has successfully sent a laser signal to a spacecraft about 290 million miles away in a major breakthrough that could potentially transform our exploration of space.
The milestone was reached by NASA's Deep Space Optical Communications technology demonstration, which is looking at the possibility of using lasers to send messages deep into space, on July 29. The signal was sent to the Psyche spacecraft, a mission launched on October 13, 2023, to explore a 140-mile-wide metallic asteroid called 16 Psyche. . NASA hopes that the laser technology can help empower future crewed missions to Mars.
"The milestone is significant. Laser communication requires a very high level of precision, and before we launched with Psyche, we didn't know how much performance degradation we would see at our farthest distances," said Meera Srinivasan, the project's operations lead at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California.
NASA said that when the spacecraft was about 240 million miles away from Earth, the laser system "achieved a sustained downlink data rate of 6.25 megabits per second, with a maximum rate of 8.3 megabits per second." NASA said this shows that the laser can outperform traditional radio-based frequencies for space communications.
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