NASA sends cat video 31 million kilometres through space

NASA has damaged its personal report by transmitting ultra-high-definition video over a distance of 31 million kilometres from deep space. The footage wasn’t of distant celestial our bodies or spacecraft, however of a cat known as Taters chasing the sunshine from a laser pointer.

Abhijit Biswas at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) tells New Scientist that Taters was chosen for the primary transmission over that distance as a result of one of many first tv check broadcasts additionally featured a cat – the cartoon feline Felix. The inclusion of a laser pointer was a visible nod to using lasers within the transmission, he says.

“Apparently this cat is very fond of chasing laser pointers, so somehow that all came together in this video,” says Biswas.

The 15 seconds of footage was transmitted from NASA’s Deep Space Optical Communications (DSOC) experiment, which is hitching a journey on the Psyche spacecraft that launched in October to intercept an asteroid of the identical identify.

The video of Taters – a JPL worker’s pet – was shot and uploaded to the craft earlier than launch. The movie additionally exhibits Psyche’s orbital path, the telescope dome of the (*31*) Observatory in California and technical details about the laser and its knowledge transmission price.

The DSOC experiment will ship high-bandwidth check knowledge to Earth throughout a two-year run, and is a part of NASA’s long-term plan to make use of lasers relatively than radios to transmit info from space. This will allow wider bandwidths and subsequently quicker knowledge switch charges that may carry complicated scientific info and high-definition photos and movies for future missions.

“DSOC is really a proof of concept which hopefully will make believers out of everybody that this can be done,” says Biswas. The approach had already been used to ship knowledge between the moon and Earth, however that could be a mere 384,400 kilometres. He says longer distances than the Taters check needs to be attainable in future.

One subject is making certain the laser mild is exactly directed so it hits the receiving station. “It’s a very narrow beam; at the distance that Psyche is right now, it [is] only a few hundred kilometres [wide by the time it reaches Earth],” says Biswas. “So if you mispoint it ever so slightly, you’ll be in the Pacific Ocean or somewhere else. You’ll completely miss. So that was something there was a lot of anxiety over.”

The video was transmitted at near-infrared wavelength by a laser transceiver and took 101 seconds to journey from the craft to Earth.

The 267-megabits-per-second message was acquired by tools on the Hale Telescope at (*31*), earlier than being transmitted over the web to JPL in southern California, the place the video was performed in actual time. That knowledge price makes DSOC quicker than most home broadband connections.