From deep space, this cat video traveled to Earth in just 101 seconds

2023-12-22 06:30:00

NASA can’t resist the videos of cute cats that abound on the internet either. On Monday, December 11, she broadcast a clip whose star was… Taters, the cat of an employee of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory of the American space agency! For about fifteen seconds, we see the white and red animal pursuing a light point coming from a laser pointer. So far nothing very impressive and yet… The video was streamed from deep space, more than 30 million kilometers from Earth! A first.

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This was made possible thanks to a brand new infrared laser communications technology developed by NASA called Deep Space Optical Communications. In detail, the agency’s engineers sent the video signal to the Psyche probe placed in orbit of the asteroid of the same name then, thanks to innovative technology, it sent the images back to Earth which the Palomar observatory located in California (United States) has received. The video took only 101 seconds to arrive with a maximum transmission rate of 267 megabits per second, a rate equivalent to that of 4G+. “After receiving the video at Palomar, it was sent to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory via the internet, and this connection was slower than the signal from deep space,” observes NASA in a press release.

Increase bandwidth

The arrival of this touching video on Earth therefore represents a feat for NASA. Its laser telecommunications device could ultimately replace the radio wave systems used for current space missions and enable data transmission from deep space 10 to 100 times faster. “Increasing our bandwidth is essential to achieving our future science and exploration goals,” NASA said, citing the ability to travel complex scientific information as well as high-definition images and video between Earth and deep space. Possibilities which allow us to envisage sending humans to Mars in the coming decades a little more concretely…