Here goes another one - do not worry, I am about done with Planetary Radio archives, I am now digging my way through March 2003 :-) Emily said that sending continous video streams from the surface instead of the current slide shows will be possible once we establish laser communication link instead of radio transmissions. Only then would the bandwidth be sufficient to download 30 fps movies of "ground truth" :-) The pointing accuracy required for laser transmissions is already there but it would require having a dedicated 10 meter scope sitting on Earth to receive. I guess Keck's observing time would be too precious to do that, so we would have to try another scope. And this is where optical SETI comes in. They have recently started the optical branch of their search with a large but allegedly not very accurately finished scope (they do not need to be accurate as they expect to detect flashes of artificial light coming from nearby stars). But if we add these two concepts, would it not be possible to use an optical array similar to SETI's for establishing laser communications with Mars NOW instead of waiting another decade or two until 10-meter scopes become affordable enough to be feasible for such tasks?

There were many experiments with laser for communications. One of them was from Messenger when it was about between 10-20 millions kilometers from Earth, after its fly-by, JHP was able to conducted an successfull experiment. On the other side, I believe that the cancelled telecommunication spacecraft, MTO (Mars Telecommunications Orbiter) was going to perform optical telecomunications.

Rodolfo