How NASA's new laser communications mission will work in space

[Admin]

The goal is to speed up solar system communications.

How NASA's new laser communications mission will work in space : Read more

 

[Pogo]

"Newly announced private space stations will only expand the need for fast information flowing to and from Earth. Meanwhile, astronauts on the moon and a sample return mission on Mars could benefit from faster communications speeds 10 to 100 times faster than current-day radio. "

This could be a bit confusing. It's not that the communications signal goes faster, both radio and laser propogate at C, it's that with the short wavelength of laser as opposed to radio, you can cram much more stuff in one second of transmission; the laser could send many 12 megapixel images in the same amount of time that radio can send one image. This begs a question, if the laser is transmitted from the moon, how big is the beam when it reaches earth a second and a half later, how accurate must the aim be? And from Mars?

 

[Pogo]

Another way to test this concept would be transmitting images and other communications to the retroreflectors left on the moon by the Apollo program and see how it comes back, that would be about 768,000 km travel distance and about 3 seconds.