Earth just picked up a laser transmission beamed from a record-breaking 140 million miles away, a landmark moment for the technology which NASA says could help send human beings to Mars.
The message was sent by the space agency’s Psyche spacecraft, which is currently floating around 1.5 times the distance between Earth and the Sun.
NASA said in a statement that the achievement “provides a glimpse into how spacecraft could use optical communications in the future, enabling higher-data-rate communications of complex scientific information as well as high-definition imagery and video in support of humanity’s next giant leap: sending humans to Mars.
The laser message was zapped Earthward by NASA’s Deep Space Optical Communications transceiver mounted on the Psyche.
Meera Srinivasan, the project’s operations lead at the space agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California said: “We downlinked about 10 minutes of duplicated spacecraft data during a pass on April 8.
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Now that Pysche has travelled over seven times further away, the rate at which it sends and receives data is markedly reduced.
The latest test saw the spacecraft transmitting data across millions of miles at around 25 megabits per second, which NASA says eclipses the project’s goal of demonstrating that at least one megabit per second could be achieved from such a distance.
Psyche is scheduled to fly past the Red Planet in 2026, before heading toward its main destination, a giant metal-rich asteroid orbiting between the Sun and Mars known as 16 Psyche, from which the spacecraft gets its name.
It’s expected to begin orbiting and studying the vast 64,000-square-mile space boulder by 2029.
Pysche will aim to map out the minor planet, which contains precious metals said to be worth a mind-blowing $700 quintillion.
