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.

NASA / GSFC / ASU

An enhanced close-up of the Apollo 11 landing site from NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter shows the descent stage as a bright spot, with smaller bright spots representing the experimental packages left on the moon. The enhancement brings out the tracks that the astronauts made during their moonwalks.

Forty-three years ago today, Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were on the moon for just 21 hours and 36 minutes, but thanks to a new NASA website, you can see how the lighting at their landing site changes over the course of the two-week-long lunar day.

This week, the team behind the camera on NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter unveiled an online viewer that combines imagery at different sun angles for each of the Apollo landing sites, from sunrise to sunset. Such images have been released regularly for the past three years, but it's way cooler to see them presented with a slider that lets you see the shadows shorten and lengthen as the day wears on. You can also click buttons to add labels for the artifacts left at each site, to trace the paths of the astronauts' moonwalks, or just to get your bearings.

A murky view of the Apollo 11 site, captured by LRO just before lunar sunset, served as this week's "Where in the Cosmos" picture puzzle on the Cosmic Log Facebook page. I thought it was interesting to see the last rays of the day reflected off the very top of the Eagle lunar module's descent stage, producing a bright spot at the very center of the image. You can also see how the lunar module's shadow hitting the rim of the crater to the east of the landing site.

NASA / GSFC / ASU

This view of the Apollo 11 landing site was captured by NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter just before sunset on the moon.

It didn't take long for Facebook followers to recognize what this mostly black picture showed. The first ones to register the right guesses — Mike Hardin, Brian McGraw, Wyatt Bates and James Aker — are eligible to receive celebratory pairs of 3-D glasses, courtesy of Microsoft Research's WorldWide Telescope team and yours truly. You can use your red-blue glasses to see 3-D views of the Apollo 11 site and lots of other space scenes.

The 43rd anniversary of any event is not usually that big of a deal, but today's "Dark Knight" shootings in Colorado left a lot of people looking for something positive to balance out all of the day's negativity. Apollo 11 provided that positivity, in 1969 and in 2012. I particularly liked the Twitter update from John Ryan: "News out of Colorado is grim, but today's also the anniversary of the first moon landing. Take heart, humanity can do amazing things, too."

No one knew that better than the late astronomer Carl Sagan. In Sagan's reflections on the Apollo missions, which endure in his book "Pale Blue Dot" as well as the Sagan Series of videos produced by Reid Gower, the sage marveled at the rare opportunity afforded by the Cold War space effort: "Once upon a time, we soared into the solar system. For a few years. Then we hurried back. Why? What happened? What was 'Apollo' really about?"

I can't watch the video without tears coming to my eyes. But at least they're not tears of grief.

More reflections on Apollo 11:

• Transterrestrial Musings: Evoloterra
• Bad Astronomy: What Apollo means to me
• Neil Armstrong still chooses to go to the moon
• Universe Today: The journeys of Apollo, on video

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 dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has traced the moon's early history as well as the latest trash left behind by moonwalkers, and now the team behind the mission has created a video smashing 4.5 billion years of the moon's existence into less than three minutes.

"Evolution of the Moon," released to mark LRO's first thousand days in orbit, starts just after the moon's congealment into a ball of molten rock, and guides you through the giant blast that formed the South Pole-Aitken Basin, through the pummeling known as the Heavy Bombardment, right through the hail of debris that resulted in the cratered satellite we all know and love.

Only one big scene is missing from the show, in my opinion: the catastrophic impact between Earth and another planet, an event that scientists believe led to the moon's creation. Consider it the prequel to "Evolution of the Moon."

There's yet another scene that scientists are thinking about adding to the story: a collision involving the moon and a smaller moonlet, sometime after the moon's formation. Some researchers suspect that such a "Big Splat" could have been responsible for the marked difference in the terrain of the moon's near side and far side — although others think the Aitken Basin blast or gravitational forces could have done the job. NASA's GRAIL mission, which was launched last year, could shed more light on that chapter of the story.

There's also a "Tour of the Moon," about five minutes in length, that guides you through the highlights of the moon's topography with the help of LRO imagery. You'll get a quick overview on the mysteries of Orientale Basin and Aitken Basin, the artifacts left behind by the Apollo 17 mission, the far-side craters we can never see from Earth, and the future of lunar exploration. For space fans, it's must-see video.

More from Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter:

• Best view yet of the Apollo 11 landing site
• Giant moon crater detailed in close-up
• Rare volcanoes seen on moon's far side
• See the moon's marvels in 3-D

Tip o' the log to Gizmodo's Jesus Diaz and the LRO team at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.

Alan Boyle is msnbc.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. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.