Space laser beam hits Earth from 140 million miles away: NASA

It redefined long distance calling.

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

However, this correspondence was not of extraterrestrial 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 major milestone for the project by showing how optical communications can interface with a spacecraft’s radio-frequency communications system,” Meera Srinivasan, project manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, said in a statement.

This major breakthrough was achieved using a Psyche feature called Deep Space Optical Communications, or DSOC, one of the droid’s several missions on Space.com. Its prime directive is to explore 16 Psyche, the $100,000 quadrillion asteroid from which it takes its name.

NASA wanted to demonstrate the potential of laser communications to be conducted across interstellar distances, allowing for high bandwidth and much faster connections—10 to 100 times faster than today—between humans and the probes they send into space.

This achievement was particularly significant because along with sending a laser message at a record distance, NASA also managed to transmit actual data collected from the spacecraft.

“We attached about 10 minutes of duplicate spacecraft data,” explained Srinivasan. “Until then, we were sending test and diagnostic data through our downlinks from Psyche.

Last November, Psyche sent back to Earth from 10 million miles away, but it was preloaded test data and not any “real” information.

It marked the culmination of a series of messages sent by the probe since its launch on Oct. 13 atop SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket.

During a previous dry run in December, Psyche beamed data back from 19 million miles away, sending it at a maximum system speed of 267 megabits per second.

That correspondence — which included footage of an orange tabby cat named Taters — took just over a minute and a half to reach Earth, comparable to broadband Internet speeds.

In contrast, this latest DSOC transmission was only 25 megabits. This was due to the fact that Psyche was seven times further away, reducing the speed at which she could send and receive messages.

Despite the relatively raw speed, it nevertheless overshadowed the project’s goal of “demonstrating that at least 1 Mbps was possible over such a distance,” according to the release.

The landmark moment provides a taste of how the spacecraft “could use optical communications to support humanity’s next giant leap: sending humans to Mars,” NASA wrote.

Psyche is scheduled to fly by the Red Planet until 2026, after which it will fly toward its primary destination, 16 Psyche, where it is expected to reach by 2029.

Like the early pioneers’ quest for the Northwest Passage, it will aim to map this final frontier of El Dorado, which contains enough precious metals to crash the gold market.