NASA has marked a significant advancement in space exploration by successfully demonstrating laser communications from a distance of 10 million miles. The experiment was carried out on NASA’s Psyche mission, which is currently on a two-year tech demo mission, en route to the asteroid belt located between Mars and Jupiter.

The Psyche spacecraft is equipped with a laser transceiver module, capable of transmitting and receiving data at a speed up to 10 times faster than traditional radio communications. The spacecraft established contact with the Hale Telescope at the Palomar Observatory in California.

This cutting-edge technology could potentially transform the way we communicate with spacecraft in distant space. While radio waves have traditionally been used for this purpose, the use of higher frequencies of light, such as near-infrared, can significantly increase bandwidth and consequently, data speed.

The successful establishment of the communications link, known as ‘first light’, is a crucial milestone for NASA’s Deep Space Optical Communications (DSOC) experiment. This marks the first instance of optical communications being sent across such a vast distance.

The laser transceiver encodes data in the form of bits into the photons that constitute the laser. On Earth, the signal is received by a superconducting high-efficiency detector array which identifies individual photons as they arrive and decodes the data.

Trudy Kortes, director of Technology Demonstrations at NASA Headquarters, expressed: “Achieving first light is one of many critical DSOC milestones in the coming months, paving the way toward higher-data-rate communications capable of sending scientific information, high-definition imagery, and streaming video in support of humanity’s next giant leap.”

This successful demonstration sets the stage for future Mars missions to use lasers for communication with Earth. It also brings us a step closer to extending the World Wide Web across the galaxy.