A laser transmission has hit the Earth from a staggering 140 million miles away in a landmark moment, NASA has confirmed.
The space agency confirmed that the transmission had been received by Earth, which could provide a major leap forward for the future of space travel and communication.
But the long-distance communication was not of the extra-terrestrial variety, instead, it was sent by NASA's Psyche spacecraft, which is currently located around 1.5 times the distance between the Earth and Sun away.
It has been hailed as a major breakthrough in Deep Space Optical Communications (DSOC), which is one of the many tasks the Psyche is built to undertake.
While the Psyche's main mission is to explore the metal asteroid 16 Psyche, from which it takes its name, to potentially find precious diamonds and rubies on its surface, it was also used to test the possibilities of interstellar communications.
NASA wanted to show the potential for laser communications to be conducted at such vast distances, which could be groundbreaking for allowing higher bandwidth and fast connections - around 10 to 100 times faster than what is currently available - between humans on Earth and the probes they have sent into space.
Meera Srinivasan, the project’s operations lead at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory 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."
As well as the laser message, NASA also successfully transmitted data gathered from the spacecraft itself.
Srinivasan added: "We downlinked about 10 minutes of duplicated spacecraft data. Until then, we’d been sending test and diagnostic data in our downlinks from Psyche."
It's the first time real data has been sent back by Psyche, which transmitted pre-loaded test data to Earth from 10 million miles away last November.
In December the probe, which was launched on October 13 atop a SpaceX Falcon Heavy Rocket, also successfully transmitted data from 19 million miles away at the system's maximum rate of 267 megabits per second.
The correspondence took just over a minute and a half to reach Earth - comparable to current broadband internet speeds - and featured test footage including clips of an orange tabby cat called Taters.
The latest DSOC transmission was only at a speed of 25 megabits due to the fact that the Psyche was seven times further away from the Earth, reducing the speed at which it could send or receive messages.
While that speed may seem slow, it proved the project's goal that "at least 1 Mbps was possible at that distance,” according to a press release.
It is being hailed as a game-changing moment in how spacecraft "could use optical communications in support of humanity’s next giant leap: sending humans to Mars,” according to NASA.
Psyche is due to fly past Mars by 2026 before heading toward its intended destination, 16 Psyche, which it should reach by 2029, where it aims to discover if there are precious metals on the asteroid.
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