Lasers can be good.

If you are not using them to kill people

Somewhere 10 million miles from here floats NASA’s Psyche spacecraft.

Somewhere between 186 million and 372 million miles lies a metal-rich asteroid with the same name as that spacecraft.

This asteroid is scientifically relevant, because of its high metal content – may be the partial core of a planetesimal, a building block of an early planet, a key cog to our understanding of how the Universe was created.

So, it would be a good thing to have a way of transmitting information about this asteroid back to Earth in timely way?

Well that’s today’s good news.

Because earlier this month, Caltech’s Palomar Observatory in San Diego County, California received a data filled laser burst from the Psyche craft.

Think about it this way… Less than a century ago that humans successfully completed the first trans-Atlantic phone call. That’s what? About 3,000 miles? And today we can speak with lasers to a computer run spacecraft 10 MILLION MILES from here.

And this type of communication is quite a bit more robust than simple voice sounds. We’re talking aboutscientific information, navigational and mechanical changes, and high-definition imagery/video.

NASA sometimes gets a bad rap. It seems to never get headlines unless something goes wrong. It grounded the super-cool Space Shuttle program. It still hasn’t taken an astronaut back to the Moon, much less to Mars.10 Million Miles is nothing to a cool laser.

But NASA does some amazing and good things. I just wish more people knew about it.