Moona Lisa: Nasa achieves world first by using lasers to beam Da Vinci’s iconic painting to lunar satellite
Worldwide, Daily news | ankakh | January 18, 2013 23:46
Nasa has managed to send an iconic image into space using lasers.
The US space agency beamed Leonardo Da Vinci’s iconic painting, the Mona Lisa from its Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, to the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) at the moon.
The image travelled 240,000 miles by piggybacking on laser pulses that are already fired at the spacecraft and are used by the LRO to track the moon’s surface.
This is the first time anyone has achieved one-way laser communication at planetary distances,’ says principal investigator, David Smith of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
To test the transmission, the image was then returned to Earth using the spacecraft’s radio telemetry system.
The picture came back in worse quality than it was sent.
To correct the image, Sun used Reed-Solomon coding – the same type of error-correction code used to fix CD and DVD qualities.
NASA said it can now use lasers to speed up delivery of data sent from space.
NASA also plans to develop this technology for getting live, high-definition video feeds from other worlds within the solar system, including Jupiter.
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