High speed communication may be about to get even faster. Until now we've always used radio waves to communicate with, but in an up coming test, NASA will be using lasers to send and receive data. NASA will be testing the effectiveness of the system with it's Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer, which will be launched on September 6th, 2013.
If all goes well the test will proceed as follows. First, when the satellite, while orbiting the moon is in view from earth, three ground stations will shoot a laser at it's location. Once one of the beams illuminates the spacecraft, the orbiter will begin transmitting it's own laser toward the ground station and the two signals will connect, lock together, and then begin transmitting.
Data transmission from the earth to the spacecraft should happen at a rate of 20 Mbps while downloads should take place at the even faster rate of 622 Mbps. That's about ten times the speed of current radio transmissions. From this, NASA will be able to send and receive high resolution images, movies, and 3D.
If the use of this technology proves to be successful in future missions within our solar system, especially missions to Mars, it may at some point find it's way into all manner of terrestrial applications. Use of lasers to communicate here on earth my mean not only greater bandwidth but higher communication speeds with less interference, signal loss or degradation.
This is just one more piece of evidence that the future may indeed be, now.
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