NASA, Monday (18/12), announced that it had sent a high-resolution cat video using a sophisticated laser communications system on a spacecraft 31 million kilometers from Earth.
The meow-vie is 15 seconds long, featuring an orange cat named Taters. This is the first video broadcast from space, and shows the possibility of sending communications at the higher data rates needed to support complex missions such as sending humans to Mars.
The video was beamed to Earth using a laser transceiver on the Psyche probe, which traveled to the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter to explore the mysterious metal-rich object. When sending the video, the spacecraft was 80 times the distance between Earth and the Moon.
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The encoded near-infrared signal was received by the Hale Telescope at Caltech’s Palomar Observatory in San Diego County. From there, the video was sent to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California.
“One of the goals is to demonstrate the ability to send broadband video over millions of miles. “There’s nothing in Psyche that generates video data, so we typically send randomly generated test data packets,” said Bill Klipstein, technology demo project manager at JPL.
Space missions have relied on radio waves to send and receive data. However, working with lasers can increase data rates by 10 to 100 times. [ka/rs]
2023-12-19 07:30:11
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