NASA beamed ultra-high definition video of a cat named Taters again to Earth from practically 19 million miles away, the area company stated Monday.
The 15-second cat video was despatched to Earth as an experiment for NASA’s Deep Space Optical Communications. The area company hopes to at some point stream very high-bandwidth video and different knowledge from deep area, enabling future human missions past Earth’s orbit.
How did a video of Taters the Cat get to area?
While animals, together with a cat named Félicette, have really been to area, Taters shouldn’t be certainly one of them. A Jet Propulsion Laboratory worker owns the orange tabby, in accordance with NASA.
The video of Taters chasing the crimson dot of a laser pointer was uploaded to NASA’s $1.2 billion Psyche asteroid probe earlier than it was launched in October. Psyche is on a six-year, 2.2-billion-mile voyage to a uncommon, metal-rich asteroid which will maintain clues about how the cores of rocky planets like Earth first shaped.
The Taters video transmission was carried out on Dec. 11 en path to the asteroid.
“One of the goals is to demonstrate the ability to transmit broadband video across millions of miles. Nothing on Psyche generates video data, so we usually send packets of randomly generated test data,” Bill Klipstein, the tech demo’s mission supervisor at JPL, stated. “But to make this significant event more memorable, we decided to work with designers at JPL to create a fun video, which captures the essence of the demo as part of the Psyche mission.”
How did the video of Taters the Cat get despatched to Earth?
A chunk of apparatus referred to as a flight laser transceiver was used to beam the video as an encoded near-infrared laser from Psyche to the Hale Telescope at Caltech’s Palomar Observatory in San Diego County, California, NASA stated.
The record-setting transmission distance is about 80 instances the space between Earth and the moon and it took simply 101 seconds for the laser to succeed in Earth, NASA stated.
NASA/JPL-Caltech
The video was then downloaded and every body was despatched to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, the place it was performed in actual time.
“Despite transmitting from millions of miles away, it was able to send the video faster than most broadband internet connections,” Ryan Rogalin, the mission’s receiver electronics lead at JPL, stated. “In fact, after receiving the video at Palomar, it was sent to JPL over the internet, and that connection was slower than the signal coming from deep space.”
What does this imply for future area exploration?
The video’s profitable transmission marks a “historic milestone,” in accordance with NASA. As Psyche continues towards the principle asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, high-data-rate indicators will proceed to be despatched again towards Earth. Greater communication functionality from deep area may assist pave the way in which for sending people to Mars.
“This accomplishment underscores our commitment to advancing optical communications as a key element to meeting our future data transmission needs,” NASA Deputy Administrator Pam Melroy stated. “Increasing our bandwidth is essential to achieving our future exploration and science goals, and we look forward to the continued advancement of this technology and the transformation of how we communicate during future interplanetary missions.”
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