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Now this is what I call a long-distance call. This image depicts a powerful laser beam shot from a mountaintop in California to a NASA spacecraft flying through the cosmos, about 143 million miles from Earth.
The laser sent 1.4 kilowatts of power to the Deep Space Optical Communications transceiver, which was aboard the space agency’s Psyche spacecraft earlier this year. The experiment was designed to test the ability of the receiver to capture information-laden photons from such an impressive distance and then decode them, a handy thing if Mars missions are to become reality.
Read more: “If You Meet ET in Space, Kill Him”
And no, that purple crescent shape in the image isn’t a UFO. It’s just lens flare from an out-of-frame light.
More recently, the test was repeated, with Psyche receiving a signal from 218 million miles away. Read more about the experiments, conducted by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. 
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Lead image: NASA/JPL-Caltech
