“We just streamed the first ultra-HD video from deep space via laser. And it’s a video of Taters, a soran cat.” NASA announced that it has used a cutting-edge laser communication system to send a high-definition video from deep space: the protagonist is, in fact, the orange tabby cat of a NASA JPL employee chasing a light laser on a sofa. It is the first video to be transmitted this way, sent from the transmitter aboard the Psyche probe, which is traveling to the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, nearly 19 million miles from Earth. The encoded signal was then 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. “This test will pave the way for high data rate communications, supporting the next giant leap: sending humans to Mars,” concludes NASA. Space missions have traditionally relied on radio waves to send and receive data, but working with lasers can increase data speeds by 10 to 100 times.
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