Earth just received a laser message from 140,000,000 miles away
Earth has received a mysterious signal from deep in space, NASA has confirmed.
The space agency said that the strange signal originated some 10 million miles away from Earth.
If you want a bit of context, that's like going to the Moon 40 times, which is rather a long way from Earth.
What exactly is this mysterious signal that's come from outer space?
Obviously there will be the inevitable speculation that it's aliens reaching out to us from deep in space.
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However this is, of course, not the case. In fact, the device which is sending out this signal originated significantly closer to home.
That's because it's coming from a probe sent out by NASA themselves, which is sending information back to Earth on its voyage through space.
The device is called Psyche and was launched by NASA back in October 2023.
What does Psyche do?
Psyche was designed with the purpose of sending a laser beam an extremely long distance through space in a device called the Deep Space Optical Communications (DSOC).
An explanation on NASA's website reads that the probe had gone to "a metal-rich asteroid by the same name orbiting the Sun between Mars and Jupiter to study its composition."
Sounds like a good weekend out! Or it would if it didn't take much longer than a weekend to just get there.
The possibilities
NASA has since explained some of the significance of the expedition, as well as some of the findings that they hope to build on in the future.
The space agency said: "This achievement provides a glimpse into how spacecraft could use optical communications in the future, enabling higher-data-rate communications of complex scientific information as well as high-definition imagery and video in support of humanity's next giant leap - sending humans to Mars."
The importance of receiving messages back from Psyche
Meera Srinivasan, who works as the project lead on Psyche at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, told the Daily Mail: "We downlinked about 10 minutes of duplicated spacecraft data during a pass on April 8.
"Until then, we'd been sending test and diagnostic data in our downlinks from Psyche.
"This represents a significant milestone for the project by showing how optical communications can interface with a spacecraft's radio frequency comms system."
So there you have it, we're now sending back signals from a NASA probe which is millions of miles away from Earth!
Kit Roberts