NASA mentioned it had used a state-of-the-art laser communication system on a spaceship 31 million kilometres from Earth – to ship a high-definition cat video.
The 15-second meow-vie that includes an orange tabby named Taters is the , and demonstrates it is potential to transmit the higher-data-rate communications wanted to help complicated missions equivalent to sending people to Mars.
The video was beamed to Earth utilizing a laser transceiver on NASA’s Psyche spacecraft, which is journeying to the primary asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter to discover a metal-rich asteroid named Psyche.
When it despatched the video, the spaceship was 80 instances the gap between the Earth and the moon.
The encoded near-infrared sign was acquired by the Hale Telescope in San Diego County, and from there despatched to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California.
“One of many targets is to exhibit the power to transmit broadband video throughout tens of millions of miles. Nothing on Psyche generates video information, so we normally ship packets of randomly generated check information,” mentioned Invoice Klipstein, who manages the Deep Area Optical Communications Challenge at JPL.
“However to make this vital occasion extra memorable, we determined to work with designers at JPL to create a enjoyable video, which captures the essence of the demo as a part of the Psyche mission.”
Area missions have historically relied on radio waves to ship and obtain information, however working with lasers can enhance the info fee by 10 to 100 instances.
Large pounce for catkind
The ultra-HD video took 101 seconds to ship to Earth on the system’s most bit fee of 267 megabits per second — quicker than most residence broadband connections.
“In truth, after receiving the video at Palomar, it was despatched to JPL over the web, and that connection was slower than the sign coming from deep area,” mentioned Ryan Rogalin, the venture’s receiver electronics lead at JPL.
So why a cat video? First, there’s the historic connection, mentioned JPL. When US curiosity in tv started rising within the Twenties, a statue of Felix the Cat was broadcast to function a check picture.
And whereas cats might not declare the title as man’s greatest good friend, few can dispute their number-one place on the subject of web movies and meme tradition.
Members of the Deep Area Optical Communications group react to the primary high-definition streaming video to be despatched through laser by the DSOC transceiver aboard the Psyche spacecraft. Credit score: AFP
Uploaded earlier than launch, the clip reveals Taters, the pet of a JPL worker, chasing a laser mild on a sofa, with check graphics overlayed. These embody Psyche’s orbital path and technical details about the laser and its information bit fee.
Whereas laser transmission has been demonstrated in low Earth orbit and as far-off because the moon, the Psyche mission is the primary time it has been deployed in deep area. Aiming a laser beam from tens of millions of miles away requires extraordinarily exact “pointing,” a serious technical hurdle engineering groups needed to remedy.
The expertise demonstration even must compensate for the truth that within the time it takes for mild to journey from the spacecraft to Earth, each the probe and the planet could have moved – so the uplink and downlink lasers want to regulate for the change accordingly.