It's not exactly the subspace communications system of Star Trek, but it's a start. A team from NASA and MIT has started a project to create a deep-space laser communications link between Mars and Earth by 2010. "If we are planning to put people on Mars, we'll need highly reliable communication links with high data rates," said Rick Fitzgerald, a NASA project manager, in a press release. The team expects to receive data at a rate of a million bits per second when Mars is at its farthest point from Earth and reception is during the day. But when Mars is at its closest approach and reception is at night, that rate could be 30 times higher. Today, the maximum data rate transmitted to Earth by the Mars Odyssey spacecraft is about 128,000 bits per second.

# posted by James M. Pethokoukis at 2:00 PM EST
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