NASA just fired up its cosmic laser pointer and hit a bullseye 290 million miles away, successfully transmitting data via laser between what’s roughly the maximum distance between Earth and Mars.

Launched last October, NASA’s Deep Space Optical Communications experiment uses near-infrared laser beams to send information across mind-boggling distances. This cutting-edge tech allows for data transmission up to 100 times faster than traditional radio systems.

Now that the transmission and telemetry tasks have been successfully completed, the agency announced that the first phase of its comms program is completed. “Now the techniques we use to track and point have been verified, confirming that optical communications can be a robust and transformative way to explore the solar system,” said Meera Srinivasan, the project’s operations lead at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California.

NASA was able to stream HD videos from the Psyche spacecraft and receive them on Earth without minimal quality loss. The videos are nothing special, really—the most recent one is an old-fashioned montage, whereas the first one, streamed last year at a lower distance,
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Author: Jose Antonio Lanz