In a groundbreaking feat, a deep space experiment travelling on NASA’s Psyche spacecraft has successfully transmitted data via a near-infrared laser to Earth from 16 million kilometres away!

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A deep space experiment traveling on NASA’s Psyche spacecraft has just beamed a message via laser to Earth from far beyond the Moon for the first time, an achievement that could transform how spacecraft communicate.

In the farthest-ever demonstration of this type of optical communication, the Deep Space Optical Communications (DSOC) beamed a near-infrared laser encoded with test data from its position around 16 million kilometers (10 million miles) away – which is around 40 times farther than the Moon is from Earth – to the Hale Telescope at Caltech’s Palomar Observatory in California.

The DSOC is a two-year tech demonstration riding along on Psyche as it makes its way to its prime target, asteroid Psyche. The demo achieved “first light” on November 14, according to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), which manages both missions, thanks to an incredibly precise maneuver that saw its laser transceiver lock onto JPL’s powerful uplink laser beacon at its Table Mountain Observatory, which allowed the DSOC’s transceiver to aim its downlink laser at Caltech’s observatory 130 kilometers (100 miles) away.

A stunning image from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope shows a cluster of protostars at the dense center of the Milky Way.

On Nov. 17, JUICE performed a 43-minute burn to get into position for its upcoming Earth-moon flyby, the first-ever double gravity assist.

The stars move across the night sky, over long periods like 10 years, and short periods of around six months.

The James Webb Space Telescope has discovered a massive chain of 20 galaxies in the early universe, raising questions about the formation of the largest structures in the cosmos.

Using the James Webb Space Telescope, an international team, including astronomer Alexander de la Vega of the University of California, Riverside, has discovered the most distant barred spiral galaxy similar to the Milky Way that has been observed to date.

Until now it was believed that barred spiral galaxies like the Milky Way could not be observed before the universe, estimated to be 13.8 billion years old, reached half of its current age.

The research, published in Nature this week, was led by scientists at the Centro de Astrobiología in Spain.