A cute breakthrough.
Our space explorations keep blooming, this time in an unusual way. NASA has managed to stream the first Ultra-HD video via laser from deep space, but its content is probably not what you expect from this technological feat.
The 15-second clip shows a cat named Taters chasing a laser pointer – now this is what we want to see. Taters belongs to one of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) employees, and the video of him playing on the Psyche spacecraft was streamed from nearly 19 million miles away, marking a new record in this area.
“This accomplishment underscores our commitment to advancing optical communications as a key element to meeting our future data transmission needs,” said NASA Deputy Administrator Pam Melroy. “Increasing our bandwidth is essential to achieving our future exploration and science goals, and we look forward to the continued advancement of this technology and the transformation of how we communicate during future interplanetary missions.”
Image credit: NASA, JPL
The demo shows Psyche’s orbital path, Palomar’s telescope dome, technical information about the laser and its data bit rate, as well as Tater’s heart rate, color, and breed. It took 101 seconds to reach Earth, sent at 267 Mbps.
Psyche travels to the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter and this laser communications demo is meant to transmit data from deep space at rates 10 to 100 times greater than the state-of-the-art radio frequency systems used by deep space missions.
“One of the goals is to demonstrate the ability to transmit broadband video across millions of miles. Nothing on Psyche generates video data, so we usually send packets of randomly generated test data,” said Bill Klipstein, the tech demo’s project manager at JPL. “But to make this significant event more memorable, we decided to work with designers at JPL to create a fun video, which captures the essence of the demo as part of the Psyche mission.”
Even if the goal hadn't been achieved, a space video of a cat in such high quality is already worth it in my books – cat videos have just been bumped to a much greater scale.
The most astonishing fact of this whole operation is that the demo traveled all these millions of miles faster than it would through most broadband internet connections. Maybe we'll get to this point on Earth one day.
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