NASA Uses ‘Ultra-HD’ Cat Video Transmission from Deep Space to Enhance Manned Missions on Mars
Thanks to the growth of internet technology, we can now send and stream high quality videos at the click of a button. But even if you think back to just two decades ago, doing the same thing, but at a quality that would be considered poor today, was a luxury few could afford.
The world is slowly becoming a more compact place, but as we become a multi-planetary species with our high-speed space exploration missions, the need to broadcast and stream media over many millions of kilometers is slowly emerging. But what if we told you that NASA has already made this possible?
On Dec. 11, NASA’s Deep Space Optical Communications experiment “beamed” ultra-high-resolution video from a record-breaking 32 million kilometers, or 19 million miles, 80 times the distance between the Earth and the Moon.
We just streamed the first ultra-HD video brought to you via laser from deep space. And it’s a video of Taters, a tabby cat.This test will pave the way for high-data-rate communications in support of the next giant leap: sending humans to Mars. https://t.co/tf2hWxaHWO pic.twitter.com/c1FwybYsxA
— NASA (@NASA) December 19, 2023
In particular, this is part of NASA’s vision to stream ultra-wideband video to enable future human missions beyond Earth orbit.
How was the video sent and what was it about?
NASA notes that the video was 15 seconds long and was transmitted by a device called a “flying laser transceiver.” It took a total of 101 seconds to reach Earth from a distance of 32 million kilometers. In addition, the video maximizes the system’s maximum bit rate of 267 megabits per second.
In addition, NASA says the video was transmitted as “near-infrared laser” encoded data from a flight laser transceiver to the Hale Telescope at Caltech’s Palomar Observatory in San Diego, California. This was then uploaded and each looped video was sent to NASA where it was replayed in real time.
NASA also notes that these advances would help it send high-data-rate signals from even the farthest reaches of Mars to Earth, and in doing so, opens up opportunities for future manned missions to the Red Planet and allows high-resolution images to be sent back to Earth.
The video in question is of an orange tabby cat named Taters, and it shows the cat playing with a laser pointer from a toy laser light.
