The feline frontier: NASA sends cat video from deep space

NASA on Monday introduced it had used a state-of-the-art laser communication system on a spaceship 19 million miles (31 million kilometers) away from Earth—to ship a high-definition cat video.

The 15-second meow-vie that includes an orange tabby named Taters is the primary to be streamed from deep space, and demonstrates it is doable to transmit the higher-data-rate communications wanted to help advanced missions resembling sending people to Mars.

The video was beamed to Earth utilizing a laser transceiver on the Psyche probe, which is journeying to the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter to discover a mysterious metal-rich object. When it despatched the video, the spaceship was 80 occasions the space between the Earth and Moon.

The encoded near-infrared sign was acquired by the Hale Telescope at Caltech’s Palomar Observatory in San Diego County, and from there despatched to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California.

“One of many objectives is to display the power to transmit broadband video throughout hundreds of thousands of miles. Nothing on Psyche generates video knowledge, so we often ship packets of randomly generated take a look at knowledge,” stated Invoice Klipstein, the tech demo’s venture supervisor at JPL.

“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.”

House missions have historically relied on radio waves to ship and obtain knowledge, however working with lasers can enhance the information charge by 10 to 100 occasions.

Large pounce for catkind

The ultra-HD video took 101 seconds to ship to Earth on the system’s most bit charge of 267 megabits per second—quicker than most residence broadband connections.

“In actual fact, 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 space,” stated Ryan Rogalin, the venture’s receiver electronics lead at JPL.

So why a cat video? First, there’s the historic connection, stated JPL. When American curiosity in tv started rising within the Twenties, a statue of Felix the Cat was broadcast to function a take a look at picture.

And whereas cats could not declare the title as man’s finest good friend, few can dispute their number-one place on the subject of web movies and meme tradition.

Uploaded earlier than launch, the clip exhibits Tabby, the pet of a JPL worker, chasing a laser light on a sofa, with take a look at graphics overlayed. These embrace Psyche’s orbital path and technical details about the laser and its knowledge bit charge.

Whereas laser transmission has been demonstrated in low Earth orbit and as far-off because the Moon, the Psyche mission is the primary time it has been deployed in deep space. Aiming a laser beam from hundreds of thousands of miles away requires extraordinarily exact “pointing,” a significant technical hurdle engineering groups needed to clear up.

The technology demonstration even must compensate for the truth that within the time it takes for gentle to journey from the spacecraft to Earth, each the probe and the planet may have moved—so the uplink and downlink lasers want to regulate for the change accordingly.

© 2023 AFP