While the moon currently doesn't have a lot of amenities to offer, it at least has Wi-Fi.

Scientists at MIT and NASA have discovered a way to transmit data to space with the help of lasers, which they said could be very useful in the future with missions to Mars and beyond, Al Jazeera America reported. Using four separate telescopes in New Mexico that were each 6 inches in diameter and could send data as coded pulses of infrared light, the scientists were able deliver an uplink signal to a receiver that was mounted a moon-orbiting satellite.

According to Discovery News, the team of MIT and NASA scientists were able to send the data at a rate of 19.44 megabits per second over a distance of 238,900 miles. This transmission speed is comparable to slower broadband speeds here on Earth.

The team could also download information from the moon at a rate of 622 megabits per second, which is more than 4,000 times faster than radio transmission speeds now.

In an interview with Wired, Mark Stevens, of MIT Lincoln Laboratory, said that the technology still has challenges to work through as Earth's atmosphere poses transmission problems.

"Communicating at high data rates from Earth to the moon with laser beams is challenging because of the 400,000-kilometer distance spreading out the light beam," Stevens said. "It's doubly difficult going through the atmosphere because turbulence can bend light, causing rapid fading or dropouts of the signal at the receiver."

To increase the likelihood and probability that the transmission will reach its lunar destination, four telescopes were used because the atmosphere bends each of the light from laser beams differently, Al Jazeera reported. Once the lunar satellite, which has its own telescope, receives the transmission, it uses a photodetector to translate the pulses of light into electrical pulses that can be converted to data.

Stevens said the team is hopeful that the technology would one day be used in missions to deep space.

The team of scientists will present their findings on June 9 in California for the CLEO laser technology conference.

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