NASA uses laser to send video of a cat named Taters over 19 million miles
NASA uses laser to send video of a cat named Taters over 19 million miles
NASA, working to send high-bandwidth video and data from deep space to Earth, transmitted a video of a cat named Taters as part of an experiment.
What’s Taters, precious?
Spoil em, flash em, laser out a few.
Damn, beat me to it
Using a laser they could just as well send the cat. He would follow the laser just as well.
Guess what the cat is doing in the video
Taxes?
Faster than light travel achieved
Video beamed. Video intercepted by aliens. Think cats rule earth.
They're right.
They'd have to be really close. This doesn't even get close to Mars or Venus.
They are.
whistles x-files theme
So correct.
Bit annoying that they're more specific about latency than bandwidth. The laser had lower latency than broadband, but I want to know if the laser had enough bandwidth to stream the video.
This latest milestone comes after “first light” was achieved on Nov. 14. Since then, the system has demonstrated faster data downlink speeds and increased pointing accuracy during its weekly checkouts. On the night of Dec. 4, the project demonstrated downlink bit rates of 62.5 Mbps, 100 Mbps, and 267 Mbps, which is comparable to broadband internet download speeds. The team was able to download a total of 1.3 terabits of data during that time. As a comparison, NASA’s Magellan mission to Venus downlinked 1.2 terabits during its entire mission from 1990 to 1994.
Honestly the 1.2 TB I'm the early 90s is an insanely impressive figure to me. I mean in that era a gigabyte seemed like an obscene amount of data, the interat ran at less than 56 kbps, and I don't think I had a 1GB drive in my hime PC until almost the turn of the millennium. Sending and storing that much from venus is a huge accomplishment.
"The video was then downloaded and each frame was sent to NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, where it was played in real time. "
It sounds like it. Laser comm can have some insanely high data rates due to the high frequency of the radiation.
if you want more bandwidth you can just use more lasers
More lasers!!!!
What strikes me is not the bandwidth achieved but the precision of the technology to aim the laser. 19 million miles is a great distance to successfully aim a beam of light. As this technology develops, real time communications with objects in orbit like around Mars will be possible.
I'm wondering if we will need to tweak our Internet protocols to include interplanetary time? I would imagine mirroring would be much more important. Because light can only go so fast.
Yes, the high latency and intermittent connectivity is a big challenge. Delay tolerant networking (DTN) is one good way of solving this problem.
I'm sure several OSI layers have already been modified by NASA to suit their needs. But, the protocols will pretty much remain standard.
The beam is reeeealy wide by the time it gets there. Still a great achivement, though.
I presume that we're not yet concerned with what the Ansible tech awoke in the vast emptiness between, hmm?
Despite transmitting from millions of miles away, it was able to send the video faster than most broadband internet connections
That guy must be a Spectrum subscriber
"We're receiving coherent signals from the edge of the Milky Way."
"Life can exist in such isolation? What are they saying, do they need rescue?"
"It's a video of a small fuzzy animal."
"What?"
"When we probed deeper to get more context, we found millions of such videos, supposedly they're cherished non-intelligient companions and the people there wished to express that."
"...
...
What?"
This strikes me with a "They're made of meat?!" vibe.
The article isn't terribly long, but here is the direct link to Taters https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GvJtVOmFs5Q
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://www.piped.video/watch?v=GvJtVOmFs5Q
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Thank you, I came here for the cat tax.
Thank goodness for "this is a test". For a moment I was panicking about an invasion of space cats and their terrifying laser hunting capabilities.
The MCRN & UNN would be proud.
Somewhere on my work wiki is a picture of puppies that I sent over SWIFT to a bank to test that the relationship was setup properly.
Cats and dogs are always acceptable test messages
This tracks
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This is the correct use of technology. (But later let's test the ping on Doom over laserlan)
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Taters is very precious!!
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"What's Taters?"
"Po-ta-toes... Boil um mash um stick um in a stew!"
Taters, star surfer
Everything's fun and games until the Kilrathi discover this and its point of origin.
That is cute. But why a cat?
Because cute
Right. I guess I kinda agree.
Joke answer: It's cute.
Real answer: It's cute and because of that broad appeal it's easy good PR. NASA has to appeal to the populace to hope they demand their Representatives properly fund them.
Taters should have his own wikipedia page. First outer space cat video.