US space agency Nasa on Monday revealed that it successfully beamed an ultra-high-definition video of a cat named Taters back to Earth from nearly 19 million miles away for the first time.
Although Nasa has previously sent real animals including a cat named Félicette into space, Taters did not have to travel millions of miles for the space agency's latest experiment.
According to CBS News, the 15-second cat video was sent to Earth as part of an experiment for Nasa's Deep Space Optical Communications and the space agency hopes to one day stream very high-bandwidth video and other data from deep space, enabling future human missions beyond Earth's orbit.
The video of Taters, a Jet Propulsion Laboratory employee's pet orange tabby, was uploaded to Nasa's $1.2 billion Psyche asteroid probe before it was launched in October.
The Psyche is on a six-year, 2.2-billion-mile journey to a rare, metal-rich asteroid that scientists believe may hold clues about how the cores of rocky planets like Earth first formed.
The video transmission was carried out on December 11 en route to the asteroid.
"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," Bill Klipstein, the tech demo's project manager at JPL, said.
"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."
Nasa used a piece of equipment called a flight laser transceiver to transmit a video from Psyche to the Hale Telescope at Caltech's Palomar Observatory in San Diego, California.
The record-setting transmission distance is 80 times the distance between Earth and the moon, and it took just 101 seconds for the laser to reach Earth.
The video was then downloaded and each frame was sent to Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, where it was played in real-time.
"Despite transmitting from millions of miles away, it was able to send the video faster than most broadband internet connections," Ryan Rogalin, the project's receiver electronics lead at JPL, said.
"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."
The video's successful transmission marks a "historic milestone," according to Nasa.
As Psyche continues toward the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, high-data-rate signals will continue to be sent back toward Earth. Greater communication capability from deep space could help pave the way for sending humans to Mars.
