The person in charge of the project who reviews the submitted images. Photo taken on December 11, 2023 at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. (c)AFP PHOTO : NASA : JPL-Caltech
[AFP = Current Affairs]The US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) recently released a high-resolution video of a cat using the latest laser communication system aboard the Psyche, an unmanned asteroid probe 31 million kilometers away. They conducted an experiment to transmit data to Earth and announced that it was a success.
The 15-second video, featuring a cat named Taters, is the first video transmitted from deep space and proves that extremely high-resolution information can be transmitted. These technologies will be needed to support complex missions such as sending humans to Mars.
The video shows a cat chasing a laser light around a sofa, overlaid with diagrams for testing purposes such as the trajectory of the psychic.
The video was transmitted using Saiki’s laser transceiver, which is heading toward the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. At the time of transmission, the distance between Saiki and Earth was 31 million kilometers. This is approximately 80 times the distance between the Earth and the Moon.
The encoded near-infrared signals were received by the Hale Telescope at Palomar Observatory in California, and from there were sent to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in southern California.
“One of our goals is to demonstrate the ability to transmit large amounts of video at high speed over millions of miles,” said Bill Klipstein, JPL project manager. Normally, he sends out randomly generated test data, but he revealed that he collaborated with JPL’s designers to create a fun video to make it more memorable for people.
Current communications use radio frequency systems, but lasers can increase data transfer rates by a factor of 10 to 100.
The ultra-high resolution video took 101 seconds to be transmitted to Earth. The message was then sent from Palomar Observatory to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory via the Internet, but the transmission speed was slower than communications from deep space.
Why was it a cat video in the first place? One of the reasons has to do with historical circumstances. In the 1920s, when interest in television increased in the United States, a statue of Felix, a cartoon character with a black cat motif, was broadcast as a test image.
Laser transmission has already been demonstrated in low Earth orbit and on the Moon, but the Psyche mission marks the first time the experiment has been performed from deep space. Shooting a laser beam from tens of millions of kilometers away required extremely precise aiming. This was a high hurdle for the technical team to overcome.[Translation Edit]AFPBB News｜Terms of Use
