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Eventually, we're going to want to expand the World Wide Web across the galaxy, and NASA recently demonstrated a key piece of tech that could help, beamingis from Earth, and the accomplishment, achieved in November 2023, represented the first time that optical communications have been sent across such a distance.– but higher frequencies of light, such as near infrared, offer an increase in bandwidth and therefore a huge boost in data speed.
Being infrared light, engineers can easily transmit its waves in laser form. This won't get the light moving any faster, but it does tidy and constrain its beam to a narrow channel. This requires far less power than a scatter of radio waves and is harder to intercept. That doesn't mean it's a simple task. Data bits are encoded in the photons emitted by the laser, which requires a number of heavy duty instruments – including atook about 50 seconds to get from spacecraft to telescope, and both were hurtling through space while this was happening.The Psyche spacecraft with the laser transceiver shown with a gold cap.
Psyche is scheduled for a fly-by around Mars, and so tests will continue to be carried out to refine and improve this innovative"It was a formidable challenge, and we have a lot more work to do, but for a short time, we were able to transmit, receive, and decode some data,"
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