(Credit: NASA)
A NASA spacecraft far beyond the Moon was able to send a cat video back to Earth using a cutting-edge laser communication system.
The 15-second video—which shows a cat named Tater chasing a laser dot—reached NASA computers across a distance of nearly 19 million miles, with relatively low latency.
"The video signal took 101 seconds to reach Earth, sent at the system’s maximum bit rate of 267 megabits per second,” NASA says, which is faster than many US internet connections.
(Credit: NASA)The cat video was transmitted from the Psyche spacecraft, which launched in October to investigate an asteroid. The same craft is also equipped with an experimental optical communication system, called DSOC, that’s designed to send data over vast expanses of space using near-infrared lasers.
Last month, NASA conducted a successful test with DSOC, sending bits of data back to Earth over a distance of nearly 10 million miles away, or about 40 times the distance from the Moon. Then last week, the space agency conducted another test to see whether the communication system could transmit a full video.
The video itself was uploaded to the Psyche craft prior to its October launch. On Dec. 11, the spacecraft was able to transmit the video’s data across the 19-million-mile distance to the Palomar Observatory in California, which then forwarded the cat clip to NASA’s computers.
The laser technology promises to offer a massive upgrade over existing radio frequency systems for space probes, delivering 10 to 100 times more capacity. Like radio frequencies, the infrared lasers travel at the speed of light in space, but they can pack more data.
During a separate Dec. 4 test, the laser system was able to transmit downlink bit rates of “62.5Mbps, 100Mbps, and 267Mbps, which is comparable to broadband internet download speeds,” NASA says. During the same test, the space agency received a total of 1.3TB of data.
As Psyche travels further out to the solar system, NASA will continue testing the laser communication system across distances as far as Mars.