Earth has received a message laser-beamed from 100 MILLION miles away, NASA reveals

A laser beam from over 100 million miles away has just struck the Earth.

But unlike the movie Independence Day, this laser is completely harmless, and NASA says aliens are not to blame.

The laser was sent toward Earth by NASA’s Psyche spacecraft, which is currently more than 100 million miles (160 million kilometers) away from Earth.

To put that into perspective, that’s four times farther than the Moon.

NASA hopes that the new technology will allow astronauts on future missions to make video calls to Earth from places as far away as Mars.

Just like a scene from Independence Day, a laser beam fired from deep space as part of a test of NASA’s latest communications technology hit the Earth.

This was the first test, or “first light,” of the Deep Space Optical Communications (DSOC) laser system.

It is also the first time that a laser has been used to send data from a place beyond the moon.

NASA says it wants to use the technology tested here to build a communications network in space, just like the fiber-optic cable network used on Earth.

DSOC rides with the Psyche spacecraft as it completes its 2.2 billion mile (3.6 billion km) journey to asteroid 16 Psyche between Mars and Jupiter.

En route, Psyche will complete a “Mars flyby,” giving NASA engineers a chance to see if future Mars missions can use lasers to stay in contact with Earth.

“Achieving first light is one of many important milestones for DSOC in the coming months,” said Trudy Curtis, technology demonstration manager at NASA Headquarters.

Curtis added that the test paves the way for “higher data rate communications capable of sending scientific information, high-definition images and video streaming to support humanity’s next giant leap.”

The laser transceiver module, seen here in a NASA clean room, can send and receive data up to 10 times faster than radio communications.

Current satellites use radio signals to communicate, receive commands, and return data to controllers.

Radio waves and lasers are two types of electromagnetic radiation that can pass through the vacuum of space at the speed of light.

The difference is that since infrared light is a high-frequency wave, NASA’s new laser communications system can transmit more information per second.

An aviation laser transceiver takes data in bits and encodes it into the photons that make up the laser.

Back on Earth, the signal is received by an array of highly efficient superconducting detectors that identify individual photons as they arrive and decode the data.

While the signal travels at the speed of light, the large distances involved make it difficult to accurately transmit a laser signal to a receiver on Earth.

A highly efficient superconducting detector array captures and identifies individual photons to decode information transmitted by the spacecraft

NASA’s ultimate goal is to build a laser communications network throughout space to transmit more science and communications data at lower power

DSOC first installs a powerful uplink laser beacon sent by the Optical Communications Telescope Laboratory at JPL’s Table Mountain facility in California.

This allows the spacecraft to point the laser toward the communications array at Palomar, about 100 miles (130 km) to the south.

Meera Srinivasan, DSOC operations lead for NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said the test was “the first to fully integrate ground and flight transponder assets, requiring the DSOC and Psyche operations teams to work side-by-side.”

“It was a huge challenge, and we have a lot of work to do, but for a short time, we were able to transmit, receive and decrypt some data,” she added.

NASA is also preparing to establish a two-way laser communications system on the International Space Station.

Earlier this month, NASA sent a laser communications station to the International Space Station to test how high-speed lasers can be used in low orbit.

The ultimate goal is to integrate lasers into the entire communications system to build a faster and more reliable network in space.