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The first human Mars explorers will be incredibly isolated.
Using existing technologies, it will take roughly seven months to reach the Red Planet. Once there, established communications technologies have a roughly 20-minute delay.
Laser-based communication is the logical way forward. That’s why NASA has been working hard on improving its Deep Space Network with laser signal capabilities.
Laser communication can exist in many forms though. One team of scientists, for example, is developing an experimental technology that could enable ultrafast communication between Earth and Mars.
The researchers used electrical pulses to manipulate magnetic information into a polarized light signal.
Ultrafast communication with Mars
The scientists, who published their findings in a paper in the journal Nature, described their new breakthrough as a “dream come true.”
Their breakthrough is a big step forward for the field of spintronics. Spintronics is the study of the intrinsic spin of an electron and its associated magnetic moment. By manipulating the spin of electrons, scientists can store and process information at incredibly high speeds and over long distances.
“For decades we were dreaming of and predicting room-temperature spintronic devices beyond magnetoresistance and just storing information,” study co-author Igor Zutic, a physicist from the University of Buffalo, explained in a press statement. “With this team’s discovery, our dreams become reality.”
For their new study, the researchers applied an electrical pulse to transfer spin information from electrons to photos. Photon, of course, are light particles, meaning the information can be carried over great distances and at incredibly high speeds.
During their tests, they showed that this method works at room temperature. What’s more, electrical control is possible and no magnetic field is required. All of this means that it shows incredible promise for ultrafast communication between Earth and Mars, as well as in quantum technologies.
Spintronics communication explained
The new study was performed as part of an international collaboration between the University of Buffalo, the Jean Lamour Institute, and several universities in France, Germany, Japan, China, and the US.
In spintronics, information is represented by electron spin and by the direction of magnetization. Essentially, electron act as binary information (zeroes and ones) depending on the direction of spin relative to the magnetization. In other words, electrons with spin along the magnetization travel smoothly across a material like a ferromagnet, while those with opposite spin are bounced around.
Spintronic devices maintain their magnetic state indefinitely, and this state is used as stored information in communications applications.
The one issue with spintronics is that spin information is quickly lost and cannot travel far when electrons are taken out of the ferromagnet. In their new study, the researchers developed a method to overcome this obstacle. They transferred electron spin to photons, allowing the information to be beamed across massive distances and at impressive speeds.
“After more than 15 years of dedicated work in this field, our collaborative team has successfully conquered all obstacles,” said co-author Yuan Lu, senior CNRS researcher at the Jean Lamour Institute.
In the future, the researchers say their method could be used to enable ultrafast communication over interplanetary distances. Depending on the distance between Mars and Earth, it can take a laser roughly three minutes to reach Mars.
While other factors may alter the communication time, the method will likely provide a massive improvement over existing technologies. This could prove to be crucial for the mental health of future Mars colonists who will be very far from home.
Edit 30/03/24: A previous version of this article stated that it can take roughly a minute for a laser to reach Mars. This was corrected.
