A NASA agent’s cat made a round trip to deep space in 101 seconds. Well, not physically. The space agency has developed optical technology to send video at very high speeds over millions of kilometers. And it turns out that the one showing the animal playing on a sofa was made famous for achieving the fastest and farthest space travel known to date.
Do you remember “That cat”, the gif of the cat flying in the sky at full speed? Ten years later, this cat is called Tatersand it’s him, from now on, the most famous and fastest in the galaxy. The video of the adorable red and white animal chasing a laser was indeed sent through space, in high definition, until landing on Earth. An unprecedented technological demonstration carried out by NASA, in collaboration with Space X, which marks a precedent in terms of space telecommunications.
An ultra-distant signal arriving at very high speed
Taters definitely has his feet on the ground. This cat is that of an employee of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), a NASA research center in California. It was downloaded onto a spacecraft, Psyche, launched with a SpaceX rocket on October 13 towards an asteroid of the same name. In parallel with its main mission, Psyché streamed Taters’ video on the road on December 11. She was then at 30 million kilometers from Earthor at a distance equivalent to 80 times the distance between the Earth and the Moon.
The aim of the maneuver was to test a new type of optical space telecommunications: video, sent by a laser signal since the space probe, only needed 101 seconds to arrive on Earth and be received by the Hale telescope, at the Palomar Observatory (California), with a maximum data rate of 267 megabits per second, i.e. the equivalent of 4G or fiber ! Such technology “proves that it is possible to stream HD video from deep space and lays the foundation for human exploration of Mars.” I launched NASA in a message on X (formerly Twitter). Transmitting data more easily and quickly by laser over very long distances could indeed prove very useful during distant explorations, while today, radio frequencies have difficulty managing the quantity of data necessary for sending high quality images and videos over great distances.
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2023-12-21 15:42:19
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