NASA streamed cat video from deep space about 20 million miles away

NASA was able to stream a cat video from almost 20 million miles away because of laser communication.

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A video with a cat was sent back from deep space by NASA’s laser communications, according to NASA.

NASA’s Deep Space Optical Communications on Dec. 11 from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, were able to beam an ultra-high definition streaming video from around 20 million miles away, according to The New York Times. It was the first time a video was streamed from millions of miles away.

The cat belonged to one of the lab employees and is named Taters, according to the Times.

The demonstration of the cat video stream was conducted by NASA’s Deep Space Optical Communications, which is working to improve “the infrastructure for communication beyond the Earth’s orbit,” the newspaper reported.

“This accomplishment underscores our commitment to advancing optical communications as a key element to meeting our future data transmission needs,” NASA Deputy Administrator Pam Melroy said. “Increasing our bandwidth is essential to achieving our future exploration and science goals, and we look forward to the continued advancement of this technology and the transformation of how we communicate during future interplanetary missions.”

“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,” said Bill Klipstein, the tech demo’s project manager at JPL. “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.”