Laser on NASA's Psyche asteroid probe beams data from 140 million miles away

Okay, that's really cool and 25 megabits per second is actually very good compared to what they get back from other probes. At speeds like that, they could send back 4k pictures, which would be extremely high resolution for craft like this.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

DSOC aims to show that it's possible for laser communications to be conducted across cosmic distances, allowing for high-bandwidth, much faster connection between humans and the probes they send to the final frontier.

"We downlinked about 10 minutes of duplicated spacecraft data during a pass on April 8," Meera Srinivasan, the project's operations lead at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California, said in a statement.

"This represents a significant milestone for the project by showing how optical communications can interface with a spacecraft’s radio frequency comms system."

"We've learned a great deal about how far we can push the system when we do have clear skies, although storms have interrupted operations at both Table Mountain and Palomar on occasion," Ryan Rogalin, the project's receiver electronics lead at JPL, said in the statement.

High-speed connection between space explorers and the rest of humanity on Earth would mean clearer cosmic images, a smoother transition for our species as engineers look toward making moves on Mars and just generally more advanced science.

As Ken Andrews, project flight operations lead at JPL, put it: "It was a small amount of data downlinked over a short time frame, but the fact we're doing this now has surpassed all of our expectations."

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