In what is being billed as a game-changing technology for space exploration, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration will use a laser beam Thursday night to transmit a video to Earth.

NASA announced late Wednesday it will beam enhanced-definition video by laser from the International Space Station to the Table Mountain Observatory in Wrightwood, California. From there, the video will be transmitted to the mission team at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena.

Scheduled to be sent between 11:20 and 11:23 p.m. EDT, while the space station is visible passing over the Los Angeles area, the transmission will be the first of a planned series of the Optical Payload for Lasercomm Science mission, according to an agency news release

In preparation for the upcoming transmission, the SpaceX Dragon cargo spacecraft sent to the space station in April delivered equipment needed for the laser test.

The new laser communications initiative is a key part of NASA's Space Technology Mission Directorate, which is focused on developing technology for future space missions, particularly deep space treks to places like Mars, as well as for life on Earth.

With lasercom technology, data is transmitted through laser beams, which are capable of reaching achieving data transfer rates 10 to 1,000 times higher than current space communications, which rely on radio frequency transmissions, NASA explained in the release.

Optical communications, said mission manager Matt Abrahamson, is "like upgrading from dial-up to DSL. Our ability to generate data has greatly outpaced our ability to downlink it. Imagine trying to download a movie at home over dial-up. It's essentially the same problem in space, whether we're talking about low-Earth orbit or deep space."

Abrahamson noted many of the latest deep space missions have sent data back and forth at 200 to 400 kilobits per second. However, the new laser technology would be expected to transmit data at 50 megabits per second.

Since one megabit is equal to 1,024 kilobits, one could safely deduce the laser trasmission would be substantially faster that what NASA is working with now.

Last October, the space agency launched a probe -- the since-destroyed Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer -- that tested what is expected to eventually grow into an outer space version of the Internet, actually the agency's first-ever laser communications experiment.

NASA says similar systems may be used to speed up future satellite and deep space communications with robotic and human exploration missions.

The video being transmitted on Thursday, entitled "Hello, World," will later be available on YouTube.