by Koren Wetmore

Twenty-six miles northwest of Strawberry Peak, not far from Wrightwood, sits Table Mountain, a flat summit on the horizon with the orange-red glow of sunset behind it. There a group of scientists stand readying their equipment to receive a laser transmission.

On Strawberry Peak, just above Rimforest in the San Bernardino Mountains, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory's optical communications test team waits for the sky to darken, a moment that signals the end to the day's cycle of rising and falling, warming and cooling air. The team has taken two hours to set up their laser communication terminal, a device that transmits data via light, and they're not about to blast into turbulent air. Not unless they want to miss their target, said engineer Abhijit Biswas, the project task leader.

"Turbulence fractures the beam and spreads it out," Biswas said. "Intense fluctuations can extinguish it and white out the reference points the way too much light can white out the image on a camcorder."

The problem is one of several Biswas' team must evaluate while testing a prototype that will shift space communications from radio waves to light bands. The technology is a step up from fiber optics, which captures light in a cable to transmit sound or data. The new wave will be fiber-less, sending invisible signals through free space...

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