Laser message strikes Earth from 140 million miles away

NASA has just confirmed that Earth received a signal from over 10 million miles away, the equivalent of going to the Moon 40 times.

A strange signal that originated from deep space is, fortunately, not aliens, but in fact originates from Earth, so no need to panic.

That's right, this signal is not so mysterious as once thought. In fact, the signal came from NASA themselves... well a probe sent out by NASA, which is tasked with sending information back to Earth on its voyage through space.

The device is called Psyche and was launched by NASA back in October last year. The device's purpose was to send a laser beam from an extremely long distance through space in a device called the Deep Space Optical Communications (DSOC).

NASA explains the device in more detail on their website, saying the probe has gone to "a metal-rich asteroid by the same name orbiting the Sun between Mars and Jupiter to study its composition".

The reasoning for doing this, NASA explained, is to provide, "a glimpse into how spacecraft could use optical communications in the future, enabling higher-data-rater 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."

Meera Srinivasan, the project lead on Psyche at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in South 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."

It just goes to show how far technology is developing recently, and how it will help us understand the universe.

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