Mercury laser altimeter instrument aboard the MESSENGER spacecraft, and was able to communicate across a distance of 24 million km (15 million miles), as the craft neared Earth on a fly-by in May, 2005. The previous record had been set with a one-way detection of laser light from Earth, by the Galileo probe, of in 1992. Quote from Laser Communication in Space Demonstrations (EDRS) Commercial use Various satellite constellations such as SpaceX Starlink are intended to provide global broadband coverage employ laser communication for inter-satellite links between the several hundred to thousand satellites effectively creating a space-based optical mesh network. LEDs In 2001, Twibright Labs released RONJA Metropolis, an open source DIY 10 Mbit/s full duplex LED FSO over . In 2004, a Visible Light Communication Consortium was formed in Japan. This was based on work from researchers that used a white LED-based space lighting system for indoor local area network (LAN) communications. These systems present advantages over traditional UHF RF-based systems from improved isolation between systems, the size and cost of receivers/transmitters, RF licensing laws and by combining space lighting and communication into the same system. In January 2009, a task force for visible light communication was formed by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers working group for wireless personal area network standards known as IEEE 802.15.7. A trial was announced in 2010, in St. Cloud, Minnesota. Amateur radio operators have achieved significantly farther distances using incoherent sources of light from high-intensity LEDs. One reported in 2007. However, physical limitations of the equipment used limited bandwidths to about 4 kHz. The high sensitivities required of the detector to cover such distances made the internal capacitance of the photodiode used a dominant factor in the high-impedance amplifier which followed it, thus naturally forming a low-pass filter with a cut-off frequency in the 4 kHz range. Lasers can reach very high data rates which are comparable to fiber communications. Projected data rates and future data rate claims vary. A low-cost white LED (GaN-phosphor) which could be used for space lighting can typically be modulated up to 20 MHz. Data rates of over 100 Mbit/s can be easily achieved using efficient modulation schemes and Siemens claimed to have achieved over 500 Mbit/s in 2010. Research published in 2009, used a similar system for traffic control of automated vehicles with LED traffic lights. In September 2013, pureLiFi, the Edinburgh start-up working on