NASA sends adorable cat video from deep space to Earth via laser | Watch

NASA announced on Monday that it had used a state-of-the-art laser communication system on a spaceship that is 10 million miles i.e. 31 million kilometers away, and sent a high-definition cat video. The 15-second video features an orange tabby cat named Taters, who is the first to be streamed from deep space and demonstrates its possibility to transmit high data rate communication. The high data rate will also support complex missions such as humans going to Mars.

The video was thus beamed to Earth using a laser transceiver on the psyche probe which is a journey to the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter to explore the mysterious solar system. When the video was sent, the spaceship was 80 times the distance between the moon and the Earth.


The encoded near-infrared signal was received by the Hale Telescope at Caltech’s Palomar Observatory, located in San Diego County. From there the video was sent to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory located in Southern California.

According to Bill Klipstein, the tech demonstration project manager at JPL, “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.”

He further added, “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."

Space missions have always relied on radio waves to transmit the process of send and receive. However, working with lasers can increase the data rate by 10 to 100 times. The ultra-HD video took around 101 seconds to send to Earth with the system’s maximum bit rate to be around 267 megabits per second, which is faster than our broadband connections.

Sandeep Vanga Reddy comes clean on the boot licking scene in Animal: Says it was a way to show Ranvijay has got connected to Zoya

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.”

Pleasant surprise! family's secret totem turns out to be dinosaur's eggs

However, many questions were raised as to why a cat’s video was streamed. There is a historic connection, as when the Americans began their interest in television in the 1920s, a statue of Felix the Cat was broadcast to serve as a test image. Cats are not man's best friend, was a popular dispute which took over the social media, after the streaming of the video.