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A High-Bandwidth Interplanetary Connection

Posted by timothy on from the tell-your-data-to-get-bent dept.

sciencehabit writes "A new study suggests that by twisting laser light, scientists could pack enough information into interplanetary beams to speed up extraterrestrial communications to the multi-gigabit level. The pulses would be passed through a hologram or multimode optical fiber, which twists the light. On the other side, a telescope would focus the light and a second hologram, or fiber would decode the signal. That could allow much more data-rich communication between, say, Earth and probes on Mars, the researchers say. Closer to home, the approach could provide Internet links of 100 gigabits per second."

2 of 99 comments (clear)

  1. Ping times by s_p_oneil · · Score: 3, Informative

    They're going to have to do something about the terrible ping times. Its orbit is about 1.5AU, so when it's close to the Earth, the round-trip ping time will be about 8 minutes. When it's on the opposite side of the sun, it'll be about 40 minutes.

  2. Re:Size does matter... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    That's huge. Arecibo is only 0.3 km.