A video of Taters the cat chasing a laser mild has been beamed again from house
NASA
NASA has damaged its personal file by transmitting ultra-high-definition video over a distance of 31 million kilometres. The footage wasn’t of distant celestial our bodies or spacecraft, however of a cat referred to as Taters chasing 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 RCA’s first tv check broadcast additionally featured a cat, and that the inclusion of a laser pointer was a visible nod to using lasers within the transmission.
“Apparently this cat may be very keen on chasing laser pointers, so one way or the other that every one got here collectively on this video,” says Biswas.
The 15-second video was transmitted from NASA’s Deep Area Optical Communications (DSOC) experiment, which is hitching a trip with the Psyche spacecraft that launched in October to intercept an asteroid of the identical identify.
The video of Taters – a cat belonging to a JPL worker – was shot and uploaded to the craft earlier than launch. The video additionally reveals Psyche’s orbital path, Palomar’s telescope dome and technical details about the laser and its knowledge bit fee.
The DSOC experiment will ship high-bandwidth check knowledge 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. It will allow wider bandwidths and subsequently quicker knowledge switch charges that may carry advanced scientific info, high-definition imagery and video for future missions.
“DSOC is known as a proof of idea which hopefully will make believers out of all people that this may be finished,” says Biswas. The approach has been used to ship knowledge between the moon and Earth, however that may be a mere 384,400 kilometres. Biswas says longer distances must be attainable in future.
“It’s a really slim beam; on the distance that Psyche is true now, it covers only some hundred kilometres,” says Biswas. “So in the event you mispoint it ever so barely you’ll be within the Pacific Ocean or some other place. You’ll fully miss. In order that was one thing there was numerous anxiousness over.”
The video was transmitted at close to infrared wavelength by a laser transceiver and took 101 seconds to journey the space between the craft and Earth.
The 267-megabits-per-second message was acquired by tools on the Hale Telescope at Caltech’s Palomar Observatory in San Diego County, California, earlier than being transmitted over the web to the JPL in Southern California, the place the video was performed in actual time. That knowledge fee makes DSOC quicker than most home broadband connections.
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