NASA's Artemis 2 beamed HD video and photos via O2O
NASA's Artemis 2 wrapped up, and made Moon exploration feel a lot more real-time for everyone back home.
Thanks to a new laser-based system called O2O, we got near-instant HD videos and photos from space, so people worldwide could follow Artemis 2 commander Reid Wiseman, pilot Victor Glover, and mission specialists Christina Koch and Jeremy Hansen as they orbited the Moon for 10 days.
MIT Lincoln Laboratory O2O beamed 0.5TB
Developed by MIT's Lincoln Laboratory, the O2O system used infrared lasers to beam 0.5TB of data at super-fast speeds (up to 260MB per second) straight to ground stations in New Mexico, California, and Australia.
NASA even tweaked the spacecraft's orientation for better signal time.
This tech not only kept mission data safe but also means future Artemis missions will share space moments with us even faster, and in way more detail.