Nasa takes ‘significant’ step that could help send humans to Mars

Nasa has successfully sent a laser signal about 290 millions away and it could change the way we contact life outside Earth. 

Exploring whether it is possible to use lasers deep in space, the American space agency’s Deep Space Optical Communications technology demonstration reached the milestone around a year after they sent a message 10 million miles into space. 

The most recent message was sent to the Psyche spacecraft, which launched in October 2023. Its mission is to study an asteroid of the same name, but it is also carrying the Nasa experiment to test laser communication through space.

The message travelled about 290 million miles (460 million kilometres) away, which is the same distance between Earth and Mars when the two planets are at their furthest points apart. 

Dr Meera Srinivasan, the project’s operations lead at Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, said: ‘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.

‘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.’ 

Nasa hopes the laser technology can help future crewed missions to Mars as well as other explorations of our solar system.

The American space agency explains that by transporting data at rates up to 100 times higher than radio frequencies, lasers can send over complex scientific information as well as high-definition imagery and video, which are needed to support astronauts if humanity ever makes it to Mars or beyond. 

Using new age technology, data is sent to and from Psyche as bits encoded in near-infrared light. This has a higher frequency than radio waves.

This higher frequency allows more data to be packed into a transmission, allowing far higher rates of data transfer. 

Sometimes the information is really important too. The first video sent by laser from deep space was of an orange tabby cat called Taters, who was chasing a red laser light.

It was a 15 second video that was beamed to Earth from Psyche, 9 million miles (14 million kilometers) away.

It took less than two minutes for the ultra high-definition video to reach Caltech’s Palomar Observatory, sent at the test system’s maximum rate of 267 megabits per second.

As the distance from Earth increases, the speed of the connection is reduced.

So, when Psyche was 33 miles away, the spacecraft could receive data at a maximum rate of 267 megabits per second – but when the latest record was broken it was hitting a maximum of only 8.3 megabits per second.