NASA Reveals Earth Received Laser Message From 140 Million Miles Away

American space agency NASA recently revealed that Earth received a mysterious laser transmission from deep space from approximately 140 million miles away that originated from NASA's 2023 spacecraft ‘Psyche.’

NASA, in October last year, launched a space mission to send a spacecraft towards the asteroid 'Psyche 16'. The space agency's main goal with this mission was to study the asteroid's composition and find out more about its mysterious properties.

The Psyche mission is equipped with a Deep Space Optical Communications (DSOC) system, which is designed to enable laser communication across vast space distances, promising significantly faster connections compared to current methods.

Even though Psyche primarily relies on radio frequency communication, its optical communications technology has shown success in transmitting information and engineering data directly from the spacecraft back to Earth.

Project Lead on Psyche at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory Meera Srinivasan expressed her happiness on the recent success of the mission. 

During a test on April 8, the spacecraft successfully managed to transmit test data at a maximum speed of 25 Mbps surpassing the project's goal of proving at least 1 Mbps was achievable at that distance. 

'This achievement provides a glimpse into how spacecraft could use optical communications in the future, enabling higher-data-rate communications of complex scientific information as well as high-definition imagery and video in support of humanity's next giant leap: sending humans to Mars,' the space agency explained.

The experiment first started in December 2023, when Psyche was just 19 million miles away from Earth.