14 DAY TRIAL // Only yesterday, NASA made it public news that, courtesy of a technology that they hope would someday become routine, they succeeded in using a laser beam in order to send the image of the Mona Lisa from Earth to a spacecraft located in lunar orbit.
As explained in the video above, the Mona Lisa traveled over a distance of nearly 240,000 miles (386,242.56 kilometers) in digital form.
Thus, it was sent from the Next Generation Satellite Laser Ranging station at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., and made it all the way to Lunar Orbiter Laser Altimeter instrument on the spacecraft.
Commenting on this achievement, David Smith of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology made a case of how, “This is the first time anyone has achieved one-way laser communication at planetary distances.”
“In the near future, this type of simple laser communication might serve as a backup for the radio communication that satellites use. In the more distant future, it may allow communication at higher data rates than present radio links can provide,” he went on to add.