Video of cat Taters chasing laser light sent from space
NASA
NASA has broken its own record by transmitting ultra-high-definition video from deep space to a distance of 31 million kilometers. The video was not of a distant celestial body or spaceship, but of a cat called Tater chasing the light from a laser pointer.
Abhijit Biswas NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) speaks new scientist Taters were selected for the first transmission at that distance. first television test broadcast Also featured was a cat, Felix, a cartoon feline. Lasers He says the inclusion of his pointers is a visual reflection of the use of lasers in transmission.
“Apparently this cat really likes chasing laser pointers, and somehow it all came together in this video,” Biswas said.
The 15-second video was sent by NASA. Deep Space Optical Communications (DSOC) The experiment was carried out aboard the Psyche spacecraft, which was launched in October to intercept the asteroid of the same name.
A video of the JPL employee’s pet tater was taken and uploaded to the spacecraft before launch. The film also shows technical information about Psyche’s orbit, Palomar Observatory’s telescope dome in California, and lasers and their data transmission speeds.
The DSOC experiment is scheduled to transmit high-bandwidth test data to Earth during its two-year run and is part of NASA’s long-term plan to use lasers rather than radios to transmit information from space. This provides greater bandwidth and faster data transfer speeds for transmitting complex scientific information and high-resolution images and video on future missions.
“DSOC is really a proof of concept and I hope everyone believes that this can be done,” says Biswas. This technology is already being used to transmit data between the Moon and Earth, but only over a distance of 384,400 kilometers. He said it should be possible to test longer distances than the Taters test in the future.
One problem is making sure the laser light is aimed precisely at the receiving station. “It’s a very narrow beam. At the distance Psyche is now, it [is] just a few hundred kilometers [wide by the time it reaches Earth]” says Biswas. “So if you take a slight wrong turn, you’ll end up in the Pacific Ocean or somewhere else. You’ll miss it completely. So there was a lot of anxiety about that.”
The video was transmitted at near-infrared wavelengths by a laser transceiver and took 101 seconds to travel from the spacecraft to Earth.
The 267 Mbit/s message was received by the following equipment: hale telescope After being filmed at Palomar, it was transmitted via the Internet to JPL in Southern California, where the video was played in real time. This data rate makes DSOC faster than most national broadband connections.
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