Nasa has received a signal from a spacecraft 10 million miles away. The message, delivered using a distant laser, could “transform” communications with spacecraft, the space agency has said. It represents a successful test of Nasa’s Deep Space Optical Communications or DSOC experiment. It is also the first time that data has been successfully relayed through a laser from further away than the Moon – and marks a rapid increase, at more than 40 times the distance from the lunar surface. At the moment, almost all communications with craft in deep space is achieved through radio signals, sent and received from vast antennas on Earth. They have proven reliable but their bandwidth is limited, meaning that it is slow or impossible to send large files such as high-definition photos and videos. Nasa’s work on DSOC is an attempt to use optical communications through lasers instead. The technology could improve data rates by as much as 100 times, the space agency says. The first attempt to test the technology beyond the Moon left the Earth on Nasa’s Psyche mission, which left Earth last month on a mission to study a distant asteroid. The spacecraft is carrying a laser transceiver than can both send and receive laser signals in near-infrared. Last week, that equipment locked onto a Nasa laser beacon in California. Nasa says that “first light” breakthrough is one part of a host of experiments that they hope will prove the laser technology can work. “Achieving first light is one of many critical DSOC milestones in the coming months, paving the way toward higher-data-rate communications capable of sending scientific information, high-definition imagery, and streaming video in support of humanity’s next giant leap: sending humans to Mars,” said Trudy Kortes, director of technology demonstrations for the Space Technology Mission Directorate at Nasa Headquarters in Washington. Nasa likens the precision pointing of the laser signal to trying to point a light at a coin from a mile away. What’s more, the laser and its target are constantly moving: in the 20 minutes it will take for the light to travel to Earth from Psyche’s furthest distance, both the planet and the spacecraft will have moved significantly. The team will now work to refine the systems that ensure the spacecraft is pointing its lasers in the right direction. When that happens, Nasa will try an experiment to demonstrate that the spacecraft is able to maintain high-bandwidth data transfer at different distances from Earth. It will do so by breaking the data into bits that can be encoded in the photons of light sent by the spacecraft. That light then arrives at the telescope on Earth and can be reassembled into images or other important data that will be sent by spacecraft – and perhaps humans – in the future. Read More SpaceX hints next Starship launch attempt could be soon SpaceX to launch world’s biggest rocket again after first attempt ended in explosion Nasa spots collection of shocking materials on distant planet

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The next release of the long-running Football Manager series of games - Football Manager 24 or FM24 - will be the last of its kind. This year's edition, the 20th instalment of Football Manager (where funnily enough, you act as a football manager for one of the world's many football clubs), will bring an end to the current iteration of games - and that's a promise directly from studio manager of Sports Interactive; Miles Jacobsen. With FM23, it seemed like the games change to digitize the behind-the-scenes of a football club had hit an apex - a rather boring apex for consumers. Instead of the growing addition of features that had underlined each new edition, FM23 simply existed as a slightly better FM22. And that was echoed by Jacobsen in a blog post for SI, who in response to FM23's reception has agreed that FM24 will simply bookend the series as the pinnacle of Football Manager. A complete edition. One where you can finally transfer a save from the previous game so your 400 hours of work doesn't go to waste. Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter "Football Manager 2024 will be the 20th game in Sports Interactive’s Football Manager series, and will be the last of its kind," said Jacobsen in his post. "It’s a love letter to football and the FM series as we know it. It’s the closing of this chapter of our history. You can expect a host of improvements, big and small, both in new features and revamps to existing areas of the game." But is Football Manager ending? No chance. In fact, it might be better than it has ever been by the time FM25 arrives, which will start a new chapter for the series. As part of a set of changes made to the technology powering the games, Sports Interactive's desire to revamp the engines behind FM led to the formation of 'Project Dragonfly' which would deliver a new vision for the game. However, the pandemic and multiple issues led to this being pushed back from FM22, released in 2021, to Autumn 2025. This previously unknown four-year delay will now herald and entirely new Football Manager, in a new Unity-powered engine, promising better graphics across the board and rehauled animations. "In simple terms, FM25 will have a significantly better-looking matchday experience - both on the pitch and the supporting stadium environments, alongside a vastly improved user interface that will dramatically improve how you navigate through screens and access all the information available to you as manager. We’ll also have new technology for Newgens and manager creation which are already looking really promising at this early stage," added Jacobsen. Women's football will also be added - and don't worry, your saves will continue to be transferrable. It's all change for one of the biggest series in the history of gaming. Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

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