But before humans go there, it is essential for their success and survival that we greatly enhance our ability to communicate data over interplanetary distances. Achieving that crucial enhancement is the task of the IROC program at the NASA Glenn Research Center in Cleveland, Ohio.

IROC stands for Integrated Radio and Optical Communication. Leading the program is Dr. Dan Raible.

"We've kind of outgrown the radio frequency," Raible said. "Radio frequency is great. Its very robust. But it's very slow when you get far away." Raible explained there are inherent limitations with the RF signal.

"The limitations are really speed," he told SpaceFlight Insider.

Just like with a cell phone, if one goes out into the country and gets too far from a tower, it takes longer to communicate or download information because the power of the RF signal goes down the farther one gets from the tower.  In space the same is true, but over vastly greater distances.

"The further you get from Earth, the slower you have to talk to send the message across," Raible said. "Going interplanetary, to Mars for example, it can take days, sometimes even weeks to send a picture, a jpeg.  So we're very limited on the types of information we can send over these communications systems the farther out in space we go."

These limitations do not hinder only our Mars spacecraft, but limit the communications capability of our spacecraft throughout the solar system.

"NASA right now has about 100 spacecraft across the solar system," Raible said. "We're leaving about 90-95 percent of the data on those spacecraft, never to be recovered.  So the communications with those spacecraft truly are the bottleneck in getting our science data returned from our investments onboard."

To eliminate this bottleneck and vastly improve our communications capability, Raible and his team at NASA Glenn are working to develop an optical system for space communication using a laser.