Any images at all from space even, like with Hubble and JWST. They seem so unfathomably far away.
In: 3
There’s a network of giant antennas and radio telescopes called across the globe called the Deep Space Network that handles this work.
Robotic probes in deep space communicate with Earth using ‘high-gain’ radio antennas, which are designed to send a very narrow beam of radio waves in one very specific direction. By keeping the waves tightly focused, you can greatly reduce the drop-off in signal strength over distance, though you have to aim the antenna very carefully. There’s also a network of *massive* radio antennas down here on Earth, which are designed to listen carefully to a very small area of sky, aimed at the spacecraft’s expected location.
Those aren’t even far away. Voyager 1 and 2 were launched in 1977. Voyager 1 is almost 15,000,000,000 miles away and we are still recieving data. That’s 15 billion. Pluto is 3 billion miles.
Same way we send TV signals around the world: radio waves. They’re the ideal medium for long range communications, and we’ve been making better and better antennas for over 100 years.