Key Takeaways
- NASA achieves 25Mbps speeds over 140 million miles using new technology
- Deep Space Optical Communications tested with 4K cat video beamed over 19 million miles
- NASA plans to use technology for future Mars missions, improving data transmission between Earth and spacecraft
How good is your internet speed? If you think your ISP could do better, perhaps show them this new experiment that NASA is doing. The space agency is figuring out ways to send data across vast distances of space, and early tests proved promising. Now, NASA has reported that it can achieve speeds of 25Mbps across a 140 million-mile gap, around 1.5 times the distance from the Earth to the Sun.
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NASA massively improves its data transmission capabilities over long distances
As spotted by Tom’s HardwareNASA has been hard at work tinkering with its new Deep Space Optical Communications technology. It performed its first test in December when a spacecraft beamed a 4K cat video over 19 million miles to prove it works. And to be fair, it’s a very cute cat. During this test, the technology managed to hit 267Mbps, which is really impressive even for a terrestrial connection.
Now, the spacecraft is a lot further away; 140 million miles away, to be exact. At this stage, the scientists hoped that they would get at least 1Mbps of speed between the spacecraft and Earth. Fortunately, it hit an impressive 25Mbps, which is an excellent speed when the two points are 1.5 times further away than the distance between the Earth and the Sun.
The spacecraft’s primary goal is to fly amongst an asteroid field between Mars and Jupiter to check out an asteroid named Psyche. But the Deep Space Optical Communications technology won’t be used for such huge distances for the time being. NASA’s ultimate goal is to establish a network when they send humans to Mars, acting as a quick and easy way to send and retrieve data from Earth. So, if your ISP isn’t giving you the broadband speeds you want, perhaps a rocket ship to the red planet is on your cards for the future.