A video of Taters the cat chasing a laser gentle has been beamed again from house
NASA
NASA has damaged its personal document by transmitting ultra-high-definition video over a distance of 31 million kilometres from deep house. The footage wasn’t of distant celestial our bodies or spacecraft, however of a cat known as Taters chasing the sunshine from a laser pointer.
Abhijit Biswas at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) tells New Scientist that Taters was chosen for the primary transmission over that distance as a result of one among the first television test broadcasts additionally featured a cat – the cartoon feline Felix. The inclusion of a laser pointer was a visible nod to using lasers within the transmission, he says.
“Apparently this cat may be very keen on chasing laser pointers, so in some way that each one got here collectively on this video,” says Biswas.
The 15 seconds of footage was transmitted from NASA’s Deep Space Optical Communications (DSOC) experiment, which is hitching a experience on the Psyche spacecraft that launched in October to intercept an asteroid of the identical identify.
The video of Taters – a JPL worker’s pet – was shot and uploaded to the craft earlier than launch. The movie additionally reveals Psyche’s orbital path, the telescope dome of the Palomar Observatory in California and technical details about the laser and its information transmission charge.
The DSOC experiment will ship high-bandwidth take a look at information to Earth throughout a two-year run, and is a part of NASA’s long-term plan to make use of lasers fairly than radios to transmit info from house. This can allow wider bandwidths and subsequently quicker information switch charges that may carry advanced scientific info and high-definition photographs and movies for future missions.
“DSOC can be a proof of idea which hopefully will make believers out of all people that this may be accomplished,” says Biswas. The approach had already been used to ship information between the moon and Earth, however that could be a mere 384,400 kilometres. He says longer distances than the Taters take a look at ought to be potential in future.
One difficulty is making certain the laser gentle is exactly directed so it hits the receiving station. “It’s a really slim beam; on the distance that Psyche is correct now, it [is] only some hundred kilometres [wide by the time it reaches Earth],” says Biswas. “So in the event you mispoint it ever so barely, you’ll be within the Pacific Ocean or elsewhere. You’ll utterly miss. In order that was one thing there was quite a lot of anxiousness over.”
The video was transmitted at near-infrared wavelength by a laser transceiver and took 101 seconds to journey from the craft to Earth.
The 267-megabits-per-second message was obtained by tools on the Hale Telescope at Palomar, earlier than being transmitted over the web to JPL in southern California, the place the video was performed in actual time. That information charge makes DSOC quicker than most home broadband connections.
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