National Aeronautics and Space Administration
A high-definition cat video transmitted from space is playing in real time on the computer screen of a NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory employee. Provided by NASA JPL.
For the first time, video sent from deep space to Earth was successfully streamed in real time. Communication between deep space and Earth has become possible with UHD-level high definition at a speed faster than terrestrial broadband Internet.
The U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) announced on the 19th (local time) that it had succeeded in transmitting and streaming video from tens of millions of kilometers away from Earth to Earth on the 11th, carried aboard the probe ‘Psyche’ launched last October.
The video transmitted to Earth is a video of Tatus, the pet cat of a NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) employee, playing and following a laser light. It was transmitted to Earth and played back in real time in high definition.
At the time of the video transmission, Psyche was located 19 million miles (approximately 30.58 million km) away from Earth. This is a distance equivalent to about 80 times the distance between the Earth and the Moon. Even though the video was transmitted from such a long distance, the video was transmitted in UHD-level high definition at a speed faster than terrestrial broadband Internet. It took 101 seconds to reach Earth and was transmitted at a speed of 267 megabits (Mb) per second.
The Hale Telescope at Palomar Observatory in the United States received video data and transmitted it to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory for real-time playback. It was transmitted from space to Earth so quickly that the time it took to transmit from the observatory to the laboratory was longer than the time it took to transmit from space to the observatory.
This transmission was carried out using a deep space optical communication technology called ‘DSOC’. It is a laser communication technology developed to transmit large amounts of data at high speed over long distances. NASA plans to test the possibility of communication from 390 million km away through Psyche. This is more than twice the distance between the Earth and the Sun.
“This achievement confirms our commitment to advance optical communications to meet future space data transmission needs,” said NASA Administrator Pam Melroy. “Increasing bandwidth is essential to achieving future exploration and science goals.” “He said.
