(Image source: NASA ) BY STEVEN SPARKMAN ANCHOR CHRISTIAN BRYANT If you think space could use a little culture, you might be interested to learn NASA is sending artwork to the moon — with lasers. Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa is the masterpiece that made the lunar voyage. (Via The Louvre Museum NASA digitized the image and used ground-based lasers to send the data to the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, currently circling the moon, then had the orbiter send the image back. ( Video via NASA ) The transmission wasn’t perfect thanks to distortions in Earth’s atmosphere, but the scientists were able to clean it up using the same techniques that fix errors in CDs and DVDs. Currently NASA uses radio waves to communicate with most of its satellites, and while it modestly says the new laser communication is meant to be a backup, they’re going in hard on the technology. An experimental laser communications system is scheduled to launch in August , and a full-fledged prototype is set to lift off in 2017 . Each iteration is meant to get faster and faster, until lasers can compete with radio waves in deep space. NASA has also made some big promises, like seeing the next moon, Mars or asteroid landing in HD or being able to watch a 24-hour livestream of Jupiter. ( Video via NASA ) But for all the hype, maybe the real reason they’re saying lasers will only be a backup in the near future is that they haven’t solved the basic problem with laser tech: bad weather. Back when the project was announced, a researcher told Popular Mechanics : “Radio waves travel right on through clouds, gases and particulates, but those obstacles scatter near-infrared light and would scramble transmissions. ‘The biggest challenge to an operational [laser] system is the clouds in the atmosphere...’” Mona Lisa’s voyage was the first step in untangling those challenges, allowing researchers to measure how much Earth’s atmosphere distorted the image. Overall, she travelled nearly 240,000 miles. But of course, everyone’s an art critic these days, as a writer for BetaBeat demonstrates . “Pretty cool! We can’t help but wonder, though: Why hurl a painting even humans don’t quite ‘get’ into outer space? Pretty sure aliens are just going to assume she’s secretly laughing at them.”