NASA’s 530km-high TeraByte InfraRed Delivery (TBIRD) system reached a staggering 200Gbps downlink to a receiver on the ground, IEEE Spectrum reports. This doubles last June’s 100Gbps throughput, which “was 100 times faster than the quickest internet speeds in most cities.”
Less than ten years ago, NASA was celebrating just over 600Mbps, but it now thinks the tech could eventually enable up to 5Gbps throughput from the moon:
Moreover, Mitchell says, they are looking at ways to push TBIRD’s capabilities as far away as the moon, in order to support future missions there. The rates under consideration are in the 1 to 5 gigabit per second range, which “may not seem like much of an improvement, but remember the moon is roughly 400,000 km away from Earth, which is quite a long distance to cover,” Mitchell says.
[IEEE Spectrum]
