Space laser zips cat clip 19 million miles to Earth
NASA chose a beloved internet subgenre for its first video sent via laser from deep space: cats.
The 15-second clip shows an orange tabby named Taters, the pet of a NASA employee, chasing a laser pointer. The ultrahigh-definition video, loaded onto NASA’s Psyche spacecraft before it launched Oct. 13 toward a metal-rich asteroid, traveled 19 million miles to reach Earth. That’s about 80 times the distance between the Earth and the moon.
The laser communications technology demonstration comes as space missions are producing more and more data. Laser communications could allow data rates that are 10 to 100 times higher than radio telecommunications (what most spacecraft use) of comparable size and power. This could enable higher resolution images, more science data and video streaming.
“One of the goals is to demonstrate the ability to transmit broadband video across millions of miles,” Bill Klipstein, project manager for the laser technology demonstration at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said in a news release. “But to make this significant event more memorable, we decided to work with designers at JPL to create a fun video.”
The cat video was sent to Earth on Dec. 11. It took 101 seconds to reach our planet, sent at the system’s maximum bit rate of 267 megabits per second.
“Despite transmitting from millions of miles away, it was able to send the video faster than most broadband internet connections,” Ryan Rogalin, the project’s receiver electronics lead at JPL, said in the news release. “JPL’s DesignLab did an amazing job helping us showcase this technology — everyone loves Taters.”
And, of course, NASA noted a historical link to why it chose a cat video.
Starting in 1928, a small statue of the cartoon character Felix the Cat was shown in TV test broadcast transmissions. Today, cat videos and memes are beloved online.