NASA recently took a video of a cat called ‘ Taters ‘, which was the first High Definition video sent from Earth to Deep Space.
The video with Taters was stored on the Psyche spacecraft, and is 15 seconds long. In the video, the cat is chasing a laser. The main idea of this project was to enable future missions to stream high-bandwidth video to and from Earth. The video was sent back from almost 19 million miles away, marking a historic milestone.
“This accomplishment underscores our commitment to advancing optical communications as a key element to meeting our future data transmission needs. 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.”
NASA Deputy Administrator Pam Melroy
The video demo was transmitted using a flight laser transceiver, which took 101 seconds to reach Earth at 267 megabits per second. As time progresses, NASA hopes to send high-data rate signals from the farthest distance from Earth to Mars. This will help pave the way for higher-date-rate communications capable of sending complex scientific information, as well as HD imagery and video.
Taters the cat is owned by an employee at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. We think he looks very floofy.