NASA has turned the Mona Lisa into the first digital image to be transmitted via laser beam from Earth to a spacecraft in lunar orbit, nearly 240,000 miles away, thanks to a technology that may soon become routine.

The experiment took advantage of the laser-tracking system that's in operation aboard NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, which has been circling the moon for the past three and a half years. NASA sends regular laser pulses from the Next Generation Satellite Ranging station at Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland to the space probe's Lunar Orbiter Laser Altimeter, or LOLA, to measure its precise position in lunar orbit.

For last March's Mona Lisa maneuver, researchers encoded a black-and-white version of Leonardo da Vinci's enigmatic masterpiece as a series of values in a 152-by-200-pixel grid. Each value represented a shade of black to gray to white, ranging from zero to 4,095. The signal for each pixel was then piggybacked on the ranging station's laser-tracking pulses: Each pulse was fired during one of 4,096 super-short designated time slots, at a rate of about 300 bits per second.

As the pulses were received in lunar orbit, LOLA's software used the precise timing of each pulse to figure out the grayscale value for a given pixel — and reassembled the black-and-white image. The process wasn't perfect: Atmospheric turbulence introduced laser transmission errors, even when the sky was clear. To accommodate the 15 percent error rate, the researchers used Reed-Solomon data coding, which is the same method used to smooth out the bumps in the playback of CDs and DVDs.

The picture was reprocessed and sent back to Earth using the orbiter's standard radio communication system, just to make sure that Mona survived the trip intact. Throughout the experiment, Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter conducted its regular mapping tasks without interruption.

A research report on the experiment, with Goddard's Xiaoli Sun as principal author, was published online by Optics Express on Thursday.

NASA

This composite image shows how the Mona Lisa image looked after its trip to the moon. The left side shows the picture before error correction, and the right side shows how it looked after error correction.

Sun said the Mona Lisa was chosen for the transmission because the painting is so much more visual than strings of random numbers. "It's a familiar image with lots of subtlety," he said. "You can immediately feel whether the image looks right, and how much information got lost."

The feat marked the first time anyone has achieved one-way laser communication at planetary distances, LOLA's principal investigator, David Smith of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said in a NASA news release.

"In the near future, this type of simple laser communication might serve as a backup for the radio communication that satellites use," Smith said. "In the more distant future, it may allow communication at higher data rates than present radio links can provide."

A data rate of 300 bits per second may seem achingly slow by today's standards, but NASA is planning a higher-bandwidth laser communication demonstration for its next mission to the moon, known as the Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer. When LADEE is launched in August, it will carry an experimental laser system that's designed to transmit data at a rate exceeding 600 million bits per second.

In 2017, NASA is due to send an experiment called the Laser Communications Radar Demonstration into orbit aboard a commercial satellite to test a full-fledged, beam-based communication system. Studies suggest that laser systems have the potential to transmit data at rates 10 to 100 times faster than traditional radio systems for the same mass and power, or match radio's data rate with a smaller, more efficient package.

Who knows? Mona Lisa may well mark the start of a renaissance in high-speed satellite communications.

More about next-generation communications:

• Interplanetary Internet passes test
• NASA mission to test ultimate space Wi-Fi
• Military's new radio: laser beams

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Jefferson Lab

Researchers at the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility relax after creating a new color of laser:

A new laser light color that shines 100 times brighter than any other laser could lead to a new method for determining the age of materials between 100,000 and 1 million years.

The color is called "vacuum ultraviolet" because it is absorbed by molecules in the air, requiring its use in a vacuum, according to the Department of Energy's Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility, where the color was created.

Scientists hope to use the new laser light in radio-krypton dating, a technique that uses laser light to measure isotopes of krypton. This method was first used in 2004 to determine that water in an aquifer beneath the Sahara Desert is a million years old.

The ultraviolet laser would be used to create so-called metastable atoms for use in this dating method. Targets for dating include the polar ice cap. Carbon dating, the most familiar method, peters out at about 62,000 years. Potassium-argon dating is a widely used technique to date more ancient materials — including fossils representing extinct branches of humanity's family tree. Radio-krypton dating could serve as another method for documenting dates in this key geologic era.

Greg Adams / Jefferson Lab

Jefferson Lab's free-electron laser produces laser light by accelerating electrons through these cryomodules and then into a wiggler, where electrons give off photons of light.

Researchers used the lab's free-electron laser facility to create the "vacuum ultraviolet" laser light. According to the lab, this is how it works:

In the FEL, electrons are stripped from their atoms and whipped up to high energies by a linear accelerator. The electrons are then sent into the ultraviolet beamline, where they encounter the UV wiggler. A wiggler is a device that uses magnetic fields to shake the electrons, forcing them to release some of their energy in the form of photons. As in a conventional laser, the photons bounce between two mirrors in the optical system and are then emitted as a coherent beam of light.

Scientists will spend the next few months getting the laser ready for experiments, which they hope to begin conducting in March.

Tip o' the Log to Discovery News' Amy Dusto.

John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by hitting the "like" button on the Cosmic Log Facebook page or following msnbc.com's science editor, Alan Boyle, on Twitter (@b0yle).

Alan Boyle writes: A pint-sized helicopter that gets its energy from a laser beam ran for more than 12 hours straight overnight, breaking an endurance record for laser-powered hovering.

It may look like a toy or a UFO, but the Pelican quadrocopter is actually a prototype for a new generation of mini-drones designed for military use.

The Pelican's landing came this morning -- 12 hours, 26 minutes and 56 seconds after it rose up from the floor of the Future of Flight Aviation Center in Mukilteo, Wash., just north of Seattle.

"It's been a satisfyingly boring night," Tom Nugent, president and co-founder of LaserMotive, told me when I arrived at the museum at 7 a.m. this morning.

Nugent's Seattle-area company won $900,000 last year in the NASA-backed Beam Power Challenge, thanks to the quickness of its laser-powered tether climber. Today's challenge was all about hang time rather than speed or altitude: The Pelican -- built by Ascending Technologies, a German company specializing in flying robots -- never flew much higher than 30 feet, and an autonomous control system kept it pretty much in the same position for hour after hour.

The Ascending Technologies executives who sat behind the computers controlling the craft had little to do except to adjust the software every once in a while. "We act as safety pilots," Michael Achtelik, the German company's CEO, told me.

LaserMotive developed the diode-laser beam system that kept the Pelican aloft. Near-infrared light from the equivalent of 250,000 laser pointers were focused and sent up to shine onto the quadrocopter's photovoltaic array, using a system of lenses and mirrors in the back of a delivery truck. The laser system served as a "wireless extension cord" for the Pelican, Nugent said. But the copter also had a battery capable of keeping the rotors running for a few minutes, just in case something went wrong with the 2.5-kilowatt laser.

Alan Boyle / msnbc.com

LaserMotive President Tom Nugent's reflected image shows up in a mirror that's part of the optics for the beam power system.

Jordin Kare, another one of LaserMotive's co-founders and a pioneer in the field of laser propulsion, said the laser generated enough radiation to heat up your hand if you stuck it in the beam, but nowhere near enough to blast a hole in it. "We've actually cooked hot dogs with that laser, and it takes about four or five minutes," Kare told me. "Not exactly a death ray."

Nevertheless, the copter control team wore protective glasses while the beam was on. Onlookers like myself were kept behind a line of airport-style dividers ... and were advised not to stare at the spots of laser light that reflected off the museum's ceiling. "That is actually 1,000 times brighter than it looks," Kare said.

Just a few minutes after 8 a.m., the laser beam was switched off, and Achtelik fiddled with a hand-held controller to bring the copter down for its landing. "We've just flown for the first time a battery-powered vehicle and charged it while it was flying," Dave Bashford, LaserMotive's vice president of operations, told about 20 spectators at the museum. (In August, LaserMotive pulled off a string of laser-powered flights lasting up to six hours, but in those cases the copter was tethered inside a booth.)

So now what?

Nugent said that LaserMotive will be "going after research-and-development contracts to integrate this into existing UAVs [unmanned aerial vehicles] that are being developed by the military." For example, laser-powered copters could perform on-the-road reconnaissance missions when convoys travel through a combat zone. The beam would come from a portable laser source sitting in the back of a Humvee.

Building a copter that's lightweight as well as battle-tough could be a challenge. Back in 2003, NASA built an experimental laser-powered aircraft that worked well enough inside a building but couldn't stand up to the gusty winds blowing outside. Kare said LaserMotive planned to procure a Puma UAV for future testing.

Looking farther ahead, Nugent said beam-powered aircraft could be used as portable platforms for aerial imaging or civilian communications. "You can have your own personal 'geosynchronous satellite' above you in the atmosphere," he said. Beam systems could come into play in space exploration as well -- perhaps in the form of laser-powered rovers or mini-aircraft on Mars. That's a big reason why NASA provided the prize money for the Beam Power Challenge in the first place.

LaserMotive's prize-winning performance last year proved that beam systems could work over a distance of a kilometer (0.6 miles), and now the company is talking about extending that range to tens or hundreds of kilometers. "I've actually done a design for powering a lunar base from Earth," Kare said. He's also fleshing out a concept he came up with in 1991 to launch single-stage vehicles into orbit using heat exchanger thrusters that are powered by intense laser light.

Ultimately, LaserMotive wants to take beam systems where no lasers have gone before. "We're going for solar system domination," Nugent joked.

Correction for 12:30 a.m. Oct. 29: Tom Nugent points out that LaserMotive's system focuses near-infrared light from the equivalent of 250,000 laser pointers, not 250. I don't know how the wrong number ended up in my notes ... maybe I was dazzled by the laser light. In any case, the number is fixed. Sorry about the error.

Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page or following @b0yle on Twitter. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," Alan's book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.