Space Laser Transmission Strikes Earth From 140 Million Miles Away: NASA

. . .Earth just received a laser transmission from a world- (and perhaps universe-) record-breaking 140 million miles away — which could have major implications for the future of space travel.

However, this correspondence wasn’t extraterrestrial in origin: It was actually sent by NASA’s Psyche spacecraft, which is currently located approximately 1.5 times the distance between Earth and the sun.

“This represents a significant milestone for the project by showing how optical communications can interface with a spacecraft’s radio frequency comms system,” Meera Srinivasan, the project’s operations lead at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, said in a statement.

This major breakthrough was achieved by using a Psyche feature called Deep Space Optical Communications, or DSOC, one of the droid’s several tasks per Space.com. Its main directive is exploring 16 Psyche, the asteroid from which it takes its name.

NASA wanted to show the potential for laser communications to be conducted across interstellar distances, allowing for high bandwidth and a much speedier connection — from 10 to 100 times faster than what’s available today — between humans and the probes they send into space. (Read more from “Space Laser Transmission Strikes Earth From 140 Million Miles Away: NASA” HERE)