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International Space Station beams a video back to Earth using lasers (video)
In April, NASA sent special equipment to the ISS that'll be able to test if laser beams can effectively transmit large amounts of data from space. Sounds like the project (called Optical Payload for Lasercomm Science) is going well thus far, because it successfully beamed a 27-second "Hello, World!" video back to Earth for the first time. The entire transmission lasted 148 seconds, but it took the system only 3.5 seconds to send each copy of the video clip to the project's ground station at the Table Mountain Observatory in California. It would've taken the ISS' radio waves-based technologies 10 minutes to do what OPALS did for less than two; the connection even reached a peak of 50 megabits per second.
