NASA made history again, this time, with a cat video!
If this sounds silly to you, well, forget the fact for a second that cat videos pretty much control the internet since the begining.
But this video is different, because it was actually sent from 19 million miles away from the Psyche mission spacecraft.
The Psyche mission ( killer name by the way ) was launched in October and the rocket is making its way to metal rich astroid with the name, 16 Psyche.
If you’re wondering, it won’t actually land on it, but instead orbit the asteroid.
It’s been told that there are $10,000,000,000,000,000,000 worth of precious metal on the astroid ( WHAT?! ) The spacecraft is expected to land in its orbit in August 2029.
The cat in the video is called Taters the cat, and the Psyche mission has been putting good use of its time while on its way to the metal rich astroid.
In the video, the ginger cat Taters can be seen chasing a laser pointer on a sofa, it’s the perfect video.
But before you go mad and accuse NASA of animal abuse, just know that Taters isn’t really in space. The video was filmed on Earth and was uploaded to the spacecraft before it took off.
The cat is actually owned by one of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory employees. The video was sent down to Earth from NASA’s Psyche mission in just a few seconds, faster than broadband providers. ( Where can I switch?? )
In just 101 seconds if you want to put a number on it, the entire video was sent and received.
The video was encoded into a near-infrared laser signal that was sent by a flight laser transceiver onboard the Psyche to the Hale Telescope at Mount Palomar.
Here’s what Pam Malroy who is the Deputy of Administrator at NASA had to say about it ” This accomplishment underscores our commitment to advancing optical communications as a key element to meeting our future data transmission needs. ”
” 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 ”
The experiment was a huge success and comes after the Psyche mission successfully sent a message down to Earth via a laser, just last month.
But the video is another jump forward and an impressive one as it’s proven that larger data can in fact be transferred over a beam.
Our goal was to be able to prove we can transmit broadband video across millions of miles. Said BIll Klipstein, the tech demo’s project manager at JPL.
