NASA's recent Lunar Laser Communication Demonstration (LLCD) has given researchers hope in a bright future for out-of-this-world broadband capabilities in communication technology.
The demonstration successfully showed NASA's ability to use laser communication across a distance of about a quarter-of-a-million miles, a NASA news release reported.
The researchers demonstrated the ability to download data from the moon at a record-breaking speed of 622 megabits per second (Mbps), and upload it at 20 Mbps. The team also proved the technology could be held at the same standards as NASA radio communication.
"Throughout our testing we did not see anything that would prevent the operational use of this technology in the immediate future," Don Cornwell, LLCD mission manager at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, said in the news release.
The downloading was demonstrated on board NASA's LADEE spacecraft.
"We were able to download LADEE's entire stored science and spacecraft data [one gigabyte] in less than five minutes, which was only limited to our 40 Mbps connection to that data within LADEE" Cornwell said.
If the researchers had been using NASA's current radio communication technology the download would have taken a number of days.
A high definition video of a message from NASA Administrator Charlie Bolden
was sent to the moon and back without error and only a "few" seconds of delay.
The next step for the program will be the Laser Communications Relay Demonstration (LRCD), which will show " continuous laser relay communication capabilities at over one billion bits per second between two Earth stations using a satellite in geosynchronous orbit." This type of communication could also be applied to data transfer between satellites orbiting Earth.
"We are very encouraged by the results of LLCD," Badri Younes, NASA's deputy associate administrator for Space Communications and Navigation (SCaN) in Washington, which sponsored the mission, said. "From where I sit, the future looks very bright for laser communications."
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