Taters, the orange tabby cat, has garnered significant attention recently, being featured in NASA’s groundbreaking video streamed from deep space via laser. The remarkable achievement involved beaming the video from a staggering distance of nearly 19 million miles away, equivalent to almost 80 times the space between Earth and the Moon.
According to Abi Biswas, the project technologist for NASA’s Deep Space Optical Communications (DSOC) experiment, this initiative aims to enhance the capabilities of streaming data over extended distances. The success of this project is expected to support the use of high-resolution science instruments and potentially facilitate human exploration missions to distances comparable to Mars in the future.
The video signal, transmitted on December 11, took 101 seconds to reach Earth. Launched with NASA’s Psyche spacecraft on October 13, the laser communications demo is designed to transmit data from deep space at rates 10 to 100 times faster than the current state-of-the-art radio frequency systems used in deep space missions. the orange tabby
Despite transmitting from millions of miles away, the laser communication system sent the video faster than most broadband internet connections, as highlighted by Ryan Rogalin, the lead of the project’s receiver electronics at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
It’s worth noting that the choice to feature Taters was partially inspired by Felix the Cat, a cartoon character whose statue was utilized for testing television transmissions in 1928. The 15-second test video showcases Taters curiously chasing a laser pointer, with the reassuring note that Taters remained on Earth throughout the entire transmission.