Did you know that shooting laser beams up into space is a hugely powerful way of exchanging data between spacecraft and Earth? It's called optical communications - and sending messages or pictures or other data through a laser beam is actually a thousand times better than traditional radio communication, because of the much higher frequency. Better yet, it’s happening in Australia right now.

The University of Western Australia and the Australian National University are both at the forefront of this field - they've both recently established optical communications ground stations. They’re also both part of the Australasian Optical Ground Station Network, which aims to link these types of stations together across Australia and New Zealand, and provide immense new capacity for space communications in our region.

Our featured guests for this episode are Associate Professor Sascha Schediwy (University of Western Australia) and Associate Professor Francis Bennet (Australian National University).