NEXT year, European Space Agency engineers will aim a 60-kilowatt laser at a small spacecraft orbiting the Moon. But they won’t be trying to destroy it. The laser will be testing a new light-based communication system designed to gather far more information from space probes than is possible now.
There is a pressing need for better communication with space probes. As imaging systems improve, the flood of data they generate is starting to overwhelm the low capacity radio signals that are supposed to beam data back to Earth. Organisations like NASA’s Deep Space Network – an earthbound collection of vast…
