NASA announced this Monday that it had carried out a very serious test on December 11 with a video that was much less so. In order to evaluate the effectiveness of a new laser communication system, the space agency used this technology to broadcast… a cat video. These images thus became the first to be streamed from deep space.
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The fifteen-second clip has as its main and sole actor Taters, a white and ginger cat belonging to a NASA employee. We see the animal, which is on a sofa, chasing a light point coming from a laser pointer. To carry out their experiment, the scientists sent the video signal to the Psyche probe, positioned nearly 30 million kilometers from Earth.
A flow rate higher than the terrestrial average
From there, the images were sent back to our planet, where they took 101 seconds to arrive. The signal was then picked up by the Palomar Observatory in California (United States) and the Taters images were viewed there without incident. The American agency specified that the connection which allowed the file to travel in space was faster than that used between the observatory and the NASA laboratory, although both located in the same state.
From deep space, the clip showing the cat playing was indeed sent using a rate of 267 megabits per second. This is not the first time that this laser space communication technology has been used by NASA. On the other hand, it had never before been used to transport data over such a great distance. Experts explained in a press release hope in the long term that this new system will help them to “achieve [leurs] future scientific and exploration objectives”.
2023-12-19 15:55:10
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