NASA uses laser to stream cat video from space

NASA used a laser for the first time to stream a video of an orange cat back to Earth from nearly 19 million miles away, the space agency announced Monday.

The ultra-high definition 15-second video, featuring a tabby cat named “Taters,” was beamed to Earth earlier this month using a flight laser transceiver, NASA confirmed.

Sent from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in deep space, the video took 101 seconds to reach Earth and comes as part of NASA’s Deep Space Optical Communications experiment looking at optical communications beyond the Earth-Moon system.

Researchers are hoping test videos like this will help demonstrate the ability to transmit broadband videos and huge volumes of data from deep space back to Earth.

“Increasing our bandwidth is essential to achieving our future exploration and science goals, and we look forward to the continued advancement of this technology and the transformation of how we communicate during future interplanetary missions,” NASA Deputy Administrator Pam Melroy said in a statement.

Taters, the pet of an employee with NASA’s JPL, was not physically in deep space, NASA noted. The video of Taters, ironically chasing a red laser pointer dot with overlayed graphics, was uploaded to NASA’s Psyche spacecraft prior to its launch in October.

The spacecraft launched Oct. 13 and is traveling to a metal-rich asteroid that orbits the Sun between Mars and Jupiter. While the Psyche mission is focused on studying the components of the asteroid, it is also tasked with testing the new laser communication technology in deep space.

The video transmission occurred Dec. 11 as Psyche continued on its way toward the asteroid, NASA confirmed.

“One of the goals is to demonstrate the ability to transmit broadband video across millions of miles. Nothing on Psyche generates video data, so we usually send packets of randomly generated test data,” said Bill Klipstein, the tech demo’s project manager at JPL. “But to make this significant event more memorable, we decided to work with designers at JPL to create a fun video, which captures the essence of the demo as part of the Psyche mission.”

Ryan Rogalin, the project’s receiver electronics lead at JPL, said the video was sent faster than “most broadcast internet connections” despite being sent about 19 million miles away, or about 80 times the distance between Earth and the moon.

As for why a cat was chosen to be the focus of this video, NASA said there is a historical connection. In 1928, a statue of the cartoon character Felix the Cat was used in television test broadcast transmissions.

While Taters wasn’t in space, several animals, including a cat named Félicette, have been sent into space in the past.