NASA on Monday announced it had used a state-of-the-art laser communication system on a spaceship 19 million miles (31 million kilometers) away from Earth – to ship a high-definition cat video.
The 15-second meow-vie that includes an orange tabby named Taters is the primary to be streamed from deep house, and demonstrates it is potential to transmit the higher-data-rate communications wanted to assist complicated missions corresponding to sending people to Mars.
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The video was beamed to Earth utilizing a laser transceiver on the Psyche probe, which is journeying to the principle asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter to explore a mysterious metal-rich object. When it sent the video, the spaceship was 80 times the distance between the Earth and Moon.
The encoded near-infrared signal was received by the Hale Telescope at Caltech’s Palomar Observatory in San Diego County, and from there sent to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California.
“One of many targets is to show the flexibility to transmit broadband video throughout hundreds of thousands of miles. Nothing on Psyche generates video knowledge, so we normally ship packets of randomly generated take a look at knowledge,” said Invoice Klipstein, the tech demo’s undertaking supervisor at JPL.
“However to make this important occasion extra memorable, we determined to work with designers at JPL to create a enjoyable video, which captures the essence of the demo as a part of the Psyche mission.”
Space missions have traditionally relied on radio waves to send and receive data, but working with lasers can increase the data rate by 10 to 100 times.
Giant pounce for catkind
The ultra-HD video took 101 seconds to send to Earth at the system’s maximum bit rate of 267 megabits per second – faster than most home broadband connections.
”Actually, after receiving the video at Palomar, it was despatched to JPL over the web, and that connection was slower than the sign coming from deep house,” said Ryan Rogalin, the project’s receiver electronics lead at JPL.
So why a cat video? First, there’s the historic connection, said JPL. When American interest in television began growing in the 1920s, a statue of Felix the Cat was broadcast to serve as a test image.
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And whereas cats could not declare the title as man’s greatest pal, few can dispute their number-one place in relation to web movies and meme tradition.
Uploaded earlier than launch, the clip exhibits Tabby, the pet of a JPL worker, chasing a laser gentle on a sofa, with take a look at graphics overlayed. These embody Psyche’s orbital path and technical details about the laser and its knowledge bit fee.
Whereas laser transmission has been demonstrated in low Earth orbit and as distant as the Moon, the Psyche mission is the primary time it has been deployed in deep house. Aiming a laser beam from hundreds of thousands of miles away requires extraordinarily exact “pointing,” a serious technical hurdle engineering groups needed to clear up.
The know-how demonstration even must compensate for the truth that within the time it takes for gentle to journey from the spacecraft to Earth, each the probe and the planet may have moved – so the uplink and downlink lasers want to regulate for the change accordingly.
