NASA sends 4K cat video to Earth from 31 million kilometers away
NASA has sent a video back to Earth from deep space for the first time. The 4k video, which showed images of a cat named Taters, was sent as a demonstration via a new laser communications system.
The cat video was sent from the Psyche spacecraft 19 million miles away from Earth, writes NASA. That amounts to about 31 million kilometers, or eighty times the distance between the moon and Earth. The demo consisted of a fifteen-second cat video, broadcast via a flight laser transceiver. NASA previously conducted a successful test with Psyche. Then the space agency received data via the laser from 16 million kilometers away. That was a record at the time. The new test was therefore carried out at a distance almost twice as long.
The video was sent using near-infrared signals to the Hale telescope at the Caltech Palomar Observatory in California, where the video was then downloaded. It took about 101 seconds for the video signal to reach Earth, the space agency said. The video was sent with a maximum transfer speed of 267Mbit/s. To illustrate: Netflix recommends an internet connection of at least 15Mbit/s for its 4k offering. In total, NASA managed to download 1.3 terabit of data during its various tests, which amounts to 162.5GB.
The NASA video shows images of an orange cat named Taters. Taters is the pet of one of the employees at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. In the video, the cat chases a laser pointer. Graphics are placed on top of the video, showing, among other things, Psyche’s orbit, technical information about the laser, the data rate of the stream and Taters’ heart rate. NASA recently released the video published on YouTube.
The laser communications demo was launched on October 13 as part of NASA’s Psyche demo. The system is intended to enable communications from space at higher transmission speeds than currently possible. NASA talks about data rates that are ten to a hundred times higher than the most modern radio frequency systems currently used for space missions.
The communication system should make it possible to, for example, send HD video images or complex scientific information to Earth. According to NASA, this can be done, for example, to support ‘humanity’s next great leap: sending people to Mars’.