NASA spacecraft receives signal from 290 million miles away in space

NASA has successfully sent a laser signal to a spacecraft about 290 million miles away in a major breakthrough that could potentially transform our exploration of space.

The milestone was reached by NASA's Deep Space Optical Communications technology demonstration, which is looking at the possibility of using lasers to send messages deep into space, on July 29. The signal was sent to the Psyche spacecraft, a mission launched on October 13, 2023, to explore a 140-mile-wide metallic asteroid called 16 Psyche. The signal travelled 460 million kilometres - roughly the same distance between Earth and Mars when the two planets are farthest apart. NASA hopes that the laser technology can help empower future crewed missions to Mars.

"The milestone is significant. Laser communication requires a very high level of precision, and before we launched with Psyche, we didn't know how much performance degradation we would see at our farthest distances," said Meera Srinivasan, the project's operations lead at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. "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."

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NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said the test broke the record for "the farthest laser communication ever sent" as he congratulated the team on the "extraordinary achievement". He wrote on X, formerly called Twitter: "NASA has broken the record for the farthest laser communication ever sent! We sent a laser signal to our Psyche spacecraft about 290 million miles away. Congrats, team. This extraordinary achievement will transform the way we explore the solar system."

NASA said that when the spacecraft was about 240 million miles away from Earth, the laser system "achieved a sustained downlink data rate of 6.25 megabits per second, with a maximum rate of 8.3 megabits per second." NASA said this shows that the laser can outperform traditional radio-based frequencies for space communications.