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The 15-second video featuring an orange cat, named Tabby, is the first to be streamed from deep space and demonstrates the transmission of high-data-rate communications in support of the next giant leap: sending humans to Mars.
The video was beamed to Earth using a laser transceiver on the Psyche probe, which is journeying to the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter to explore a mysterious metal-rich object, the space agency said.
When the video was sent, the spaceship was 80 times the distance between the Earth and the Moon.
The encoded near-infrared signal, received by the Hale Telescope at Caltech’s Palomar Observatory in San Diego County, was sent to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California.
Bill Klipstein, project manager tech demo at NASA’s JPL said, “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.”
“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.”
Traditionally, space missions rely on radio waves to send and receive data, but working with lasers can increase the data rate by 10 to 100 times.
The ultra-HD video of a cat
The ultra-HD video took 101 seconds to reach Earth at maximum bit rate of 267 megabits per second which was faster than most home broadband connections.
“In fact, after receiving the video at Palomar, it was sent to JPL over the internet, and that connection was slower than the signal coming from deep space,” said Ryan Rogalin, the project’s receiver electronics lead at JPL.
Why a cat video?
The JPL said there’s a historic connection in sending a cat video first. When American interest in television began growing in the 1920s, a statue of a cat, named Felix, was broadcast to serve as a test image.
And while cats may not claim the title of man’s best friend, few can dispute their number-one position when it comes to internet videos and meme culture. Uploaded before launch, the clip shows Tabby, the pet of a JPL employee, chasing a laser light on a couch, with test graphics overlayed. These include Psyche’s orbital path and technical information about the laser and its data bit rate.
While laser transmission has been demonstrated in low Earth orbit and as far away as the Moon, the Psyche mission is the first time it’s been deployed in deep space. Aiming a laser beam from millions of miles away requires extremely precise “pointing,” a major technical hurdle engineering teams had to solve.
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Published: 19 Dec 2023, 07:24 PM IST
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