NASA sends Mona Lisa to moon

GREENBELT, Maryland

Photo by Xiaoli Sun, NASA Goddard

The “Mona Lisa” has been to the moon and back, CNN has reported. The famous face was used in an experiment and carried in a laser beam to a man-made satellite orbiting the moon.

The successful transmission is a significant achievement, which Renaissance painter Leonardo da Vinci would have surely appreciated, because it marks “the first time anyone has achieved one-way laser communication at planetary distances,” said principal investigator David Smith of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

By using lasers, NASA is now on the verge of revolutionizing and speeding up delivery of data now dispatched from outer space and all around the solar system, the agency said.

The enigmatic “Mona Lisa” countenance was digitized and traveled via laser almost 386,000 kilometers from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, to the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter.
The image transmission wasn’t perfect and suffered defects because the Earth’s atmosphere caused errors, even when the sky was clear, NASA said.