Lasers—pretty cool, eh? NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) had previously figured out to use lasers to beam a video of Taters the cat through space to the Psyche spacecraft, which at the time was around 30 million kilometres away.
For Americans and Brits, that's really far away in miles. Today, however, JPL has figured out it can use lasers to communicate with that same craft now that it's over seven times further away and still score a 25 Mbps connection.
The Pysche craft is now around 225 million kilometres (140 million miles) away from Earth. It's somewhere just outside of the orbit of Mars, on its way to visit an asteroid of the same name in an asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.
Despite being so bloody far away, data streaming is working a-okay. The Psyche craft was able to send and receive information from NASA JPL's high-power uplink laser facility in Wrightwood, California at around 25 Mbps in a test on April 8.
That means, even at this mind-boggling distance, it remains comparable to domestic broadband. Though at that sort of distance, using a light-based comms system, you're looking at something like a 750 second ping, or 12.5 minutes.