The US space agency revealed yesterday that about a week ago, its telescope in San Diego recorded a video of a redhead cat chasing a laser point on a couch, broadcast from the depths of space. Forefront helps us digest the gospel, and explain how it happened.
The video was broadcast by the Psyche spacecraft, which is currently exploring an asteroid between Mars and Jupiter, 31 million kilometers from Earth – 80 times the distance from here to the moon. The transmission was part of an experiment with a laser-based communications system that allows data transmission at speeds of up to 267 megabits per second, and the 15-second 4K file took 100 seconds to descend to the computers at the Hale Telescope Center at Caltech University's Palomar Space Observatory in California—faster than many home Internet connections on earth.
Why a cat? As a tribute to television's first test broadcasts, in the early 20th century, which were a photograph of a statue of Felix the Cat – a cartoon figure of a black cat with a white face. The redhead cat is Tatras, the pet of one of the employees of NASA's Jet-Propulsion Laboratory. Various elements appear on the video, such as the transmission speed, the fact that this is an experiment, the speed of the cat's pulse and some graphic items typical of experimental television broadcasts.
Moving the high-quality experimental video over a huge distance at high speed is a great technological achievement, demonstrating the potential of laser communication for future deep space missions. In contrast to previous attempts at such communication (including an experiment carried out in the last two weeks by Elon Musk's company SpaceX) that were carried out from Earth orbit, this experiment is the first to prove that laser communication can be used for missions at much greater distances, transmitting data ten to 100 times faster than traditional radio wave communication.
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