NASA announced on Monday (December. 18) that they used a cutting-edge laser communication system to send a high-definition cat video from a spaceship to Earth, covering a distance of 31 million kilometers.
Taters, an orange tabby, is featured in the 15-second video. This is a video streamed from deep space that demonstrates the ability to transmit higher-data-rate communications required for complex missions such as sending humans to Mars.
The video was transmitted to Earth using a laser transceiver aboard the Psyche probe. The probe has been traveling through the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter to investigate a mysterious metal-rich object.
The spaceship was 80 times the distance between the Moon and the Earth when the video was sent.
The encoded near-infrared signal was received by the Hale Telescope at Caltech’s Palomar Observatory in San Diego County and sent to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California.
The tech demo’s project manager at JPL Bill Klipstein said, “One of the goals is to demonstrate the ability to transmit broadband video across millions of miles. Nothing on Psyche generates video data, so we usually send packets of randomly generated test data.”
“But to make this significant event more memorable, we decided to work with designers at JPL to create a fun video, which captures the essence of the demo as part of the Psyche mission,” he added.
The system’s maximum bit rate of 267 megabits per second took 101 seconds to send the ultra-HD cat video to Earth
Space missions have traditionally relied on radio waves to send and receive data; however, working with lasers is likely to increase the data rate by 10 to 100 times.
The system’s maximum bit rate of 267 megabits per second took 101 seconds to send the ultra-HD video to Earth, which is faster than home broadband connections.
According to Ryan Rogalin, the project’s receiver electronics lead at JPL, “In fact, after receiving the video at Palomar, it was sent to JPL over the internet, and that connection was slower than the signal coming from deep space.”
JPL explained why they streamed a cat video by citing a historical connection. When Americans’ interest in television began to grow in the 1920s, a statue of Felix the Cat was broadcast as a test image. Cats also continue to reign supreme in the world of viral internet videos and meme culture.
