Slashdot Mirror
Shining a Light on Interplanetary Communication
An anonymous reader writes "Researchers at the MIT have developed a new device that they claim could one day boost interplanetary communication to broadband speeds. From the article: 'The new light detector improves detection efficiency to 57 percent at a wavelength of 1,550 nanometers--the same wavelength used by optical fibers on Earth to carry broadband signals to homes and offices. Currently, light detectors only absorb about 20 percent of the light they receive. "It can take hours with the existing wireless radio frequency technology to get useful scientific information back from Mars to Earth," said study team member Karl Berggren from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "But an optical link can do that thousands of times faster."'"
You won't want to be getting into any Shotgun duels while playing Duke Nuke'em Forever on some Earthly server when you're orbiting Mars. Fine. But for uploading instructions and downloading science the speedboost is pretty freaking handy.
Don't forget about data outages, for example when the Sun is blocking the line of sight from Mars to Earth. Waiting for the line to clear is going to cause some major latency. The good news is that these outages should be forseeable.
Don't take the above poster too seriously. He doesn't.