NASA spacecraft receives a signal from 290 million miles away

NASA has successfully sent a laser signal a distance of about 290 million miles, breaking previous records and potentially changing our exploration of the solar system.

The milestone was reached by NASA’s Deep Space Optical Communications Technology Demonstration, which explores whether lasers could be used to send messages into the depths of space. Lasers can transmit data at rates up to 100 times the radio frequencies used today, allowing for more complex, high-definition data, but also requiring much greater precision to operate.

It was sent to the Psyche spacecraft, which launched in October 2023. Its primary mission is to study an asteroid of the same name, but it also carries a NASA experiment to test laser communications through space.

The distance – equivalent to about 460 million kilometers – is approximately the same as the distance between Earth and Mars when they are at their greatest distance.

NASA hopes that laser technology will help enable future manned missions to Mars, among other explorations of our solar system, so the successful test represents a major achievement.

“This is an important accomplishment. Laser communication requires a very high level of precision, and before our launch with Psyche, we did not know how much performance degradation we would see at our furthest distances,” said Meera Srinivasan, project operations lead at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in a statement.

“The techniques we use for tracking and signaling have now been verified, confirming that optical communications can be a powerful and transformative way to explore the solar system.”

NASA Administrator Bill Nelson sent his congratulations to the participating team on Twitter/X. “This extraordinary achievement will change the way we explore the solar system,” he wrote.

Late last year, NASA announced that it had successfully completed a similar transmission from a distance of 10 million miles. Since then, she’s broken a whole host of records as Psyche continues to travel far from Earth.

This also included the first ultra-high-definition video broadcast from space. It happened late last year, when Psyche sent out pictures of cats called Taters.

The greater the distance from the ground, the lower the communication speed. When the spacecraft was 33 miles away, it could receive data at its maximum rate of 267 megabits per second, but when the last record was broken, in the summer, it reached a maximum of just 8.3 megabits per second.