NASA has received a signal from a spacecraft.
The message was delivered from a spacecraft 10 million miles away. The space agency has said that using remote lasers could “transform” communication with spacecraft.
It represents a successful test of NASA’s Deep Space Optical Communications, or DSOC, experiment. It is the first time that data has been successfully transmitted via laser from farther than the Moon.
Almost all communications with spacecraft in space are achieved via radio signals, from large antennas on Earth. They are proven to be reliable but their bandwidth is limited.