Earth Just Received A Laser-Beamed Message From 16 Million Kilometers Away

iflscience.com

Saved you a click: it’s from a human made craft, roughly 40x Earth-moon distances away.

They expect to reach bandwidths 10-100x what is currently possible with radio waves. However, it requires very precise alignment, and more importantly, requires taking into account the relative movement of the sender and receiver.

This craft is headed further away up to where they expect the communication delay to be around 20 minutes, up from the current 50 seconds.

That's an impressive 1/10 AU (distance of Earth orbit from sun 150 million km).

For the 20 min communication delay, that would be 2.4 AU (360 million km).

absolutely impressive!

How can anything aim with such precision?

the trick is lots of amplification on both ends is able to compensate for a wide beam spread, edfa's allow you to optically amplify the sent signal and allows the faint received signal to also be amplified

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