GRAND FORKS — The University of North Dakota is hoping to give its students hands-on experience with “out of this world” technology.

Next year, students will be using lasers to talk to satellites.

It was an exciting day at UND on Wednesday, Dec. 10, as a new telescope was hoisted onto the roof of Witmer Hall, but it’s not for looking through. The telescope will be used to shoot lasers into space, lasers that will end up transmitting data.

“You need to make light and encode light in the shapes or timing of optical pulses you send,” said Markus Allgaier, physics and astrophysics assistant professor.

Those pulses of light act like a laser Morse code and are much more efficient than radio frequencies.

“We can time these events of counting photons down to about 100 picoseconds. So a picose

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