NASA recently announced plans to use laser communications on the International Space Station by 2023. Laser communications, or optical communications, use light to transmit data instead of radio waves. This technology has the potential to greatly increase the speed of data transmissions, potentially up to a rate of 100 megabits per second. This new technology could revolutionize communication between the space station and the ground, enabling scientists to send much larger amounts of data more quickly than ever before. With this technology, the International Space Station could become a center for global data communications.

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source: Phys.org