Ultra high definition video sent by NASA cat named tater The space agency announced Monday that it had returned to Earth from about 19 million miles away.
The 15-second cat video was sent to Earth as part of NASA’s deep space optical communications experiment. The space agency hopes to one day stream extremely high-bandwidth video and other data from deep space, enabling future manned missions beyond Earth’s orbit.
How did Tater the Cat’s video get into space?
While including animals; cat named felicette, who have actually been to space, but Taters is not one of them. According to NASA, an employee of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory owns the orange truck.
A video of Taters chasing the red dot of a laser pointer was uploaded to NASA’s $1.2 billion psyche The asteroid probe before its launch in October. Psyche is on a six-year, 2.2 billion-mile journey to a rare, metal-rich asteroid that may hold clues to how the cores of rocky planets like Earth first formed. It’s on.
Taters’ video transmission occurred on December 11 while en route to the asteroid.
“One of our goals is to demonstrate that we can send broadband video over millions of miles. There’s nothing in Psyche that generates the video data, so we typically use randomly generated test data. packets,” said Bill Klipstein, JPL’s technology demonstration project manager. . “But to make this important event even more memorable, we decided to work with JPL’s designers to create a fun video that captures the essence of the demo as part of the Psyche mission. .”
How did Tater the Cat’s video get sent to Earth?
NASA said an instrument called a Flight Laser Transceiver was used to transmit video as an encoded near-infrared laser from Psyche to the Hale Telescope at California Institute of Technology’s Palomar Observatory in San Diego County, California.
The record transmission distance was about 80 times the distance between Earth and the moon, and the laser took just 101 seconds to reach Earth, NASA said.
of video It was then downloaded and each frame was sent to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, where it was played back in real time.
“We were able to transmit video faster than most broadband Internet connections, even though we were transmitting from millions of miles away,” said Ryan Rogalin, director of reception electronics for the project at JPL. said. “In fact, after receiving the video at Palomar, he was sent to JPL via the Internet, but that connection was slower than the signal coming from deep space.”
What does this mean for future space exploration?
NASA says the successful transmission of the video marks a “historic milestone.” As Psyche heads toward the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, high data rate signals will continue to be beamed back toward Earth. Improving the ability to communicate from deep space could pave the way for sending humans to Mars.
“This achievement confirms our commitment to advancing optical communications as a key component to meeting future data transmission needs,” said NASA Deputy Administrator Pam Melroy. “Increased bandwidth is essential to achieving future exploration and science goals, and we look forward to continued advances in this technology and the transformation of how we communicate during future interplanetary missions.”