NASA streams cat video from space

NASA streamed lab employee’s cat named Taters 18.6 million miles away in space from their Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

The high-definition video streamed the cat in space roughly 80 times the distance from the Earth to the moon. The experiment was part of NASA’s Deep Space Optical Communications experiment to improve the infrastructure for communication beyond the Earth’s orbit.

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“This would be like the same capability that you’d want to have if you’re sending an astronaut to the surface of Mars or something like that,” said Dr. Abhijit Biswas, the project technologist. “You want to have constant contact with them.”

The demonstration was carried out with the help of NASA’s Psyche spacecraft which was launched on October 13 to explore an asteroid with same name.

The transmitted data rates of 267 megabits per second are comparable to rates on Earth, which are often between 100 and 300 megabits per second. The video was transmitted using a flight laser transceiver, along with a laser transmitter and a ground laser receiver on Earth.

Dr. Biswas and Dr. Srinivasan had been developing the technology for decades aiming to scale up the optical communications technology that was already being used on satellites orbiting much closer to Earth.

The D.S.O.C. project is to test their limits at the end of June when NASA engineers are expected to transmit from a distance that is 10 times as far: 186 million miles.