'Significant' space breakthrough made as NASA receives signal from 290 million miles away

A huge breakthrough has been made in space exploration, and it could change the way that we explore our solar system.

NASA completed the feat in July this year, after sending the Psyche spacecraft out into space on 13 October 2023, so it could explore a 140-mile-wide metallic asteroid named 16 Psyche.

Its aim was to prove that lasers could be used to send messages deep into space, and the attempt was made earlier this year to find out if this was possible.

It's been a year since the spacecraft was launched (PATRICK T. FALLON/AFP via Getty Images)

A laser signal was successfully sent from Earth to the space tech about 290 million miles away, a massive game changer in the science world.

It was done with the help of NASA's Deep Space Optical Communications technology demonstration, which has responsible for this mission and developing the use of lasers to send messages.

Apparently, the achievements did stop there, as the 290 million miles that it travelled is about the distance between Earth and Mars at their furtherest points apart.

NASA hopes that this can aid future planned missions to Mars, which they have been talking about for decades.

Meera Srinivasan, the project's operations lead, stated: "The milestone is significant. Laser communication requires a very high level of precision, and before we launched with Psyche, we didn't know how much performance degradation we would see at our farthest distances.

"Now the techniques we use to track and point have been verified, confirming that optical communications can be a robust and transformative way to explore the solar system."

NASA are hopeful that this advancement could help in future manned missions to Mars (Getty Stock Photo)

Bill Nelson, an administrator at NASA also weighed in, revealing that this test broke the record for the 'farthest laser communication ever sent', taking to X to congratulate the successful team and hailing the revolutionary achievement.

He wrote: "NASA has broken the record for the farthest laser communication ever sent! We sent a laser signal to our Psyche spacecraft about 290 million miles away.

"Congrats, team. This extraordinary achievement will transform the way we explore the solar system."

For all you boffins out there, NASA detailed that the system managed to achieve 'a sustained downlink data rate of 6.25 megabits per second, with a maximum rate of 8.3 megabits per second'.

Basically, it signalled that the laser could prove to be more effective than traditional radio-based frequencies for space communications, though it has been over 50 years since our last manned mission to the Moon, let alone one to Mars.