NASA sends cat video 31 million kilometres through space

NASA has damaged its personal file by transmitting ultra-high-definition video over a distance of 31 million kilometres from deep house. The footage wasn’t of distant celestial our bodies or spacecraft, however of a cat referred to 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 in every of the first television test 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 may be very keen on chasing laser pointers, so someway that every one got here collectively on this video,” says Biswas.

The 15 seconds of footage was transmitted from NASA’s Deep Space Optical Communications (DSOC) experiment, which is hitching a experience 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 Palomar Observatory in California and technical details about the laser and its information transmission charge.

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

“DSOC is known as a proof of idea which hopefully will make believers out of everyone that this may be carried out,” says Biswas. The method had already been used to ship information between the moon and Earth, however that could be a mere 384,400 kilometres. He says longer distances than the Taters check ought to be attainable in future.

One concern is making certain the laser gentle is exactly directed so it hits the receiving station. “It’s a really slim beam; on the distance that Psyche is true now, it [is] just a few hundred kilometres [wide by the time it reaches Earth],” says Biswas. “So if you happen to mispoint it ever so barely, you’ll be within the Pacific Ocean or some place else. You’ll utterly miss. In order that was one thing there was lots of nervousness 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 gear on the Hale Telescope at Palomar, earlier than being transmitted over the web to JPL in southern California, the place the video was performed in actual time. That information charge makes DSOC sooner than most home broadband connections.