NASA makes use of laser to ship video of a cat named Taters over 19 million miles

NASA beamed ultra-high definition video of a cat named Taters again to Earth from almost 19 million miles away, the house company mentioned Monday. 

The 15-second cat video was despatched to Earth as an experiment for NASA’s Deep House Optical Communications. The house company hopes to sooner or later stream very high-bandwidth video and different information from deep house, enabling future human missions past Earth’s orbit.

How did a video of Taters the Cat get to house?

Whereas animals, together with a cat named Félicette, have really been to house, Taters isn’t considered one of them. A Jet Propulsion Laboratory worker owns the orange tabby, in accordance with NASA. 

The video of Taters chasing the pink dot of a laser pointer was uploaded to NASA’s $1.2 billion Psyche asteroid probe earlier than it was launched in October. Psyche is on a six-year, 2.2-billion-mile voyage to a uncommon, metal-rich asteroid that will maintain clues about how the cores of rocky planets like Earth first fashioned.

The Taters video transmission was carried out on Dec. 11 en path to the asteroid. 

“One of many objectives is to show the flexibility to transmit broadband video throughout hundreds of thousands of miles. Nothing on Psyche generates video information, so we often ship packets of randomly generated take a look at information,” Invoice Klipstein, the tech demo’s undertaking supervisor at JPL, mentioned. “However to make this vital occasion extra memorable, we determined to work with designers at JPL to create a enjoyable video, which captures the essence of the demo as a part of the Psyche mission.”

How did the video of Taters the Cat get despatched to Earth?

A bit of kit known as a flight laser transceiver was used to beam the video as an encoded near-infrared laser from Psyche to the Hale Telescope at Caltech’s Palomar Observatory in San Diego County, California, NASA mentioned. 

The record-setting transmission distance is about 80 occasions the gap between Earth and the moon and it took simply 101 seconds for the laser to succeed in Earth, NASA mentioned.

The video was then downloaded and every body was despatched to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, the place it was performed in actual time. 

“Regardless of transmitting from hundreds of thousands of miles away, it was capable of ship the video sooner than most broadband web connections,” Ryan Rogalin, the undertaking’s receiver electronics lead at JPL, mentioned. “Actually, after receiving the video at Palomar, it was despatched to JPL over the web, and that connection was slower than the sign coming from deep house.”

What does this imply for future house exploration?

The video’s profitable transmission marks a “historic milestone,” in accordance with NASA. As Psyche continues towards the principle asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, high-data-rate alerts will proceed to be despatched again towards Earth. Better communication functionality from deep house may assist pave the best way for sending people to Mars. 

“This accomplishment underscores our dedication to advancing optical communications as a key factor to assembly our future information transmission wants,” NASA Deputy Administrator Pam Melroy mentioned. “Rising our bandwidth is important to reaching our future exploration and science objectives, and we look ahead to the continued development of this expertise and the transformation of how we talk throughout future interplanetary missions.”