The moon. Photo: Shutterstock

European scientists have bounced a long-range message off the Moon, setting a new world record of 730,360 km for the furthest distance a long-range message has ever travelled.

The players involved claim that the IoT standard long-range could become relevant for future lunar communications.

It was also the first time a data message was bounced using an off-the-shelf small RF chip. For a brief moment in time the entire message ‘PI9CAM’ (the call sign of the telescope) was in space on its way from Earth to the Moon and back. The team, some of them licensed radio amateurs, consisted of Jan van Muijlwijk (CAMRAS), Tammo Jan Dijkema (CAMRAS), Thomas Telkamp (Lacuna Space) and Frank Zeppenfeldt (European Space Agency).

“This is a fantastic experiment. I had never dreamed that one day a LoRa message would travel all the way to the moon and back. I am impressed by the quality of the data captured. This dataset is going to become a classic for radio communications and signal processing students. A big thumbs up to the team and CAMRAS foundation for making this possible,” Nicolas Sornin, co-inventor of LoRa, said in a statement.