An orange cat named Taters stars in the first video transmitted by laser from space. The 15-second video was beamed to Earth from NASA’s Psyche spacecraft, which is 19 million miles (30 million kilometers) away.
It took less than two minutes for the ultra-high-definition video to reach Caltech’s Palomar Observatory, sent at the test system’s maximum speed of 267 megabits per second.
The video was loaded into the Psyche laser communications experiment before the spacecraft blasted off to a rare metal asteroid in October. The mission team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, decided to feature a cute 3-year-old cat belonging to an employee.
The video was broadcast to Earth on Monday (11/12/2023) and released by NASA this week. Despite the huge distance, the test delivered video faster than most connections internet broadband on earth.
NASA wants to improve communications from space, especially as astronauts prepare to return to the moon with the goal of Mars. The laser demo is intended to transmit data at speeds up to 100 times greater than radio systems currently used by spacecraft far from Earth.
Further transmission tests are planned as Psyche heads towards the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. However, Taters will no longer appear.
An art director at JPL’s DesignLab, Joby Harris is very proud, but doesn’t want his cat’s new celebrity to overwhelm him.
“I celebrated his highlights with him, but made sure he kept his attention,” Harris said, as reported by NPR.
Reporting from CBS, the 15-second cat video was sent to Earth as an experiment for NASA’s Space Optical Communications. The space agency hopes to one day stream videos with bandwidth very high altitude and other data from space, thereby enabling future human missions beyond Earth orbit.
NASA considers the successful video transmission to mark a historic milestone. As Psyche continues toward the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, high data rate signals will continue to be sent back to Earth. Greater communications capabilities from space could help pave the way for sending humans to Mars.
“This achievement underscores our commitment to advancing optical communications as a key element to meet future data transmission needs. Increase bandwidth is critical to achieving future exploration and science goals, and we look forward to the continued advancement of this technology and the transformation of the way we communicate during future interplanetary missions,” said NASA Deputy Administrator Pam Melroy.
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2023-12-21 09:22:32
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