Our planet has just received a message from deep space… one that originated some 10 million miles away. That message was from ourselves to ourselves, but it was the furthest optical message ever sent or received and it is a baseline for future deep space communications.
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00:00 [Music]
00:03 Our planet has just received a message from deep space,
00:06 one that originated from some 10 million miles away.
00:10 Okay, so that message was from ourselves to ourselves,
00:12 but it was the furthest optical message ever sent or received,
00:16 and it's a baseline for future deep space communications.
00:19 Currently, most messages are sent via radio waves.
00:21 The problem is those waves are slow due to low bandwidth.
00:24 Enter optical near-infrared messaging,
00:26 a communication method that can drastically increase
00:29 the amount of information sent.
00:30 The recent optical message was sent from a distance
00:33 40 times out of Earth to the Moon.
00:34 This is all part of NASA's Deep Space Optical Communications, or DSOC,
00:39 and this first message is being referred to as First Light,
00:42 with Director of Tech Demonstrations at NASA,
00:44 Trudy Cortez, saying about it,
00:46 "Achieving First Light is one of many critical DSOC milestones
00:49 in the coming months,
00:50 paving the way toward higher data rate communications
00:53 capable of sending scientific information,
00:55 high-definition imagery,
00:56 and streaming video in support of humanity's next giant leap."
01:00 Humanity's next giant leap being settling on other worlds,
01:03 such as the Moon and eventually Mars.