Ultra-high definition video of an orange tabby cat named Taters has been beamed to Earth from almost 19 million miles away. Why? Because NASA determined to make use of the 15-second video as a part of its Deep Space Optical Communications experiment, CBS News experiences. The video of the cat (who’s owned by an worker of Jet Propulsion Laboratory) was uploaded to NASA’s Psyche asteroid probe earlier than its October launch, and final week, on Psyche’s option to the asteroid it is aiming for, the video was transmitted again to Earth. It’s the primary time NASA has used a laser to stream a video from deep area, CNN experiences. The area company is looking the feat a “historic milestone.”
Fittingly, Taters is seen chasing the pink dot from a laser pointer within the video. As for NASA’s use of a laser, “a flight laser transceiver was used to beam the video as an encoded near-infrared laser,” CBS explains. The distance between Psyche and Caltech’s Palomar Observatory in San Diego County, California, the place the video was beamed, is about 80 instances so far as it’s from the Earth to the moon. It took solely 101 seconds for the laser to succeed in Earth; it may possibly transmit information at as much as 100 instances the velocity of conventional radio wave methods different NASA missions have used. Having the power to rapidly talk from deep area might turn out to be useful as people look to at some point journey to Mars. (Read extra NASA tales.)
