Earth has just received a laser message from space that traveled 16 million kilometers

The Psyche spacecraft, 10 million miles away — about 40 times the distance from Earth to the moon — sent the message in 50 seconds and it was received by the Hale Telescope in San Diego County.

According to Business Insider columnist Marianne Jeannot, the path of communications between Earth and Mars is slowly being paved, as scientists seek in the future to have humans colonize the Red Planet.

“It opens the way for higher data rate communications capable of sending scientific information, high-definition images and video to support humanity’s next giant leap: sending humans to Mars,” said Trudy Curtis, NASA’s technology demonstration manager.

DSOC Revolution

Humans have been conducting space missions for about half a century, but communications have always been a headache, either because they were impractical or because they took too long to send messages.

The DSOC (Deep Space Optical Communications) experiment attempts to untie the hands of experts and form the “optical fiber” of space, so that there is no interference between Earth and the space mission in question.

The experiment used a laser equipped with a cryogenically cooled superconducting detector that can detect a billion photons per second and extract every bit of information from the faint traveling light, Marianne Guinott reported.

The test is considered a success, but there are still many challenges to solve, such as the time it takes to send a message between Mars and Earth. With current data, it takes about 20 minutes, because the distance is more than twice the distance between Earth and the Sun.

So NASA plans to conduct new tests in the asteroid belt to see if the signal is affected by objects that might interfere between the sender and receiver.

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