NASA | Laser Comm: That's a Bright Idea

Laser light made records obsolete. NASA is on the verge of doing the same thing with space based communications. Before the end of the decade, the Laser Communication Relay Demonstration (LCRD) mission will revolutionize the way we move tons of data from orbit to ground and all around the solar system.

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[AdanBlinBlinDJ]

Keep the good work NASA. Maybe I'll sell you one of my energy projects.

[taesheren]

We'll see. If it's not a success we didn't loose anything (except a little time). How ever, if it is successful, the potential is huge.

[Lion_McLionhead]

Decades & decades of work for the tiniest incremental progress in this.

[dragospuri]

I understand that radio waves are hard to focus and that the bandwidth is limited (I think, though not sure, that is due to encoding/modulation). I know nothing about diffusing unfortunately. Also, there are problems with laser communications due to aiming and dust.
But, I assume they know what they're doing, so Best of luck to them. :)

[divyasrikeeran]

can someone pls explain how lcrd works- in a detailed way. thanks!

[frikusa]

No. Radio travels at speed of light, laser travels at... speed of light. They will increase information throughput with the new system, kind of like upgrading your Internet plan.

[amacro]

A very exciting concept! Next step laserportation lol

[simcity]

So, let me get this straight. Let's say the group of people has landed on Mars. If they send a radiomessage back to earth. instead of it taking 20 mins to reach earth, it would be instant with this laser communication? That's really an amazing step forward in space communication. It makes me really excited :)

[lightsidemaster]

I'd like to know how powerful these lasers have to be. Also a good step to a new level of space exploration. But if we leave the solar system we will have to send these signals through some sort of wormhole, slipstream or whatever in order to make communication reasonable over these distances. I just hope that is not too far away in the future.

[ColtaineCrows]

Did you watch the video? Because, he explained exactly what was wrong with radio.. Anyway... Limited bandwith is the problem. If you want to know why it has limited bandwith I suggest you do a little research, but essentially radio waves transmitted over long distances have HUGE dataloss due to diffusing. It's really hard to focus radio transmissions over great distances, which is why radiotelescopes need to be huge arrays of parabolic antennaes.

[kbqad]

Lasers and radio both travel at the speed of light, beastman5566, so they'll still take the same 14 minutes Lasers can, however carry more information more efficiently than radio

[RigoJancsi]

You'll never have a live-feed from Jupiter, since even light needs several minutes to Earth. So there will always be a delay in deep space mission communication.

[TadaGanIarracht]

Haha yeah can you imagine the power these things will have?

[MrChrisRab]

The main problem I see with this, is that you have to point extremely precisely otherwise all data is lost.

[roidroid]

i... i didn't realise that satellites used anything OTHER than lasers to communicate. D:
What have they been using, RF? oh dear

[KalElKryptonsFinest]

Low frequency = low bandwidth. There is a reason radio used to be called shortwave.

[laikros]

remember the fist internet speeds ?And what we got now? The Mars Rovers have "weak" cameras to send faster images and faster rover response.

[KalElKryptonsFinest]

Light is much faster than radio? I don't think you meant that. Light is much higher frequency.

[ScottHodgins]

relativistically, it'd still be live.

[romario]

Who cares about the network speed? Default ICMP echo packet is 32 byte :) If you send 1 packet per second, you need only 32 bytes/s. And response time would be about 6 mins.