NASA stated 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 doable to transmit the higher-data-rate communications wanted to assist complicated missions comparable 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 principle asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter to discover a metal-rich asteroid named Psyche.
When it despatched the video, the spaceship was 80 occasions 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 objectives is to show 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,” stated Invoice Klipstein, who manages the Deep House Optical Communications Challenge at JPL.
“However to make this important 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.”
House missions have historically relied on radio waves to ship and obtain information, however working with lasers can improve the information price by 10 to 100 occasions.
Big pounce for catkind
The ultra-HD video took 101 seconds to ship to Earth on the system’s most bit price of 267 megabits per second — quicker than most house broadband connections.
“Actually, 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 house,” stated Ryan Rogalin, the mission’s receiver electronics lead at JPL.
So why a cat video? First, there’s the historic connection, stated JPL. When US curiosity in tv started rising within the Nineteen Twenties, a statue of Felix the Cat was broadcast to function a check picture.
And whereas cats could not declare the title as man’s greatest buddy, few can dispute their number-one place relating to web movies and meme tradition.
Members of the Deep House Optical Communications crew react to the primary high-definition streaming video to be despatched by way of 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 embrace Psyche’s orbital path and technical details about the laser and its information bit price.
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 house. Aiming a laser beam from tens of millions of miles away requires extraordinarily exact “pointing,” a serious technical hurdle engineering groups needed to clear up.
The know-how 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 may have moved – so the uplink and downlink lasers want to regulate for the change accordingly.
