On Dec. 11, NASA engineers eagerly gathered at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., to watch a cat video, wondering if it was in the pristine high definition they expected.
To their relief, it is. For the first time, high-definition video — it’s of a lab employee’s cat named Taters — has been streamed from 18.6 million miles away, or about 80 times the distance from Earth to the moon , the farthest ever.
The demonstration is part of NASA Deep Space Optical Communications experiment, which aims to improve the infrastructure for communication beyond Earth’s orbit. As an example, if humans are going to Mars, the need exists for larger amounts of data to be sent over longer distances. This demonstration marks another step toward such a possibility.
“It’s going to be like the same capability you’d want to have if you were sending an astronaut to the surface of Mars or something like that,” said Dr. Abhijit Biswas, the project technologist. “You want to have an ongoing relationship with them.”
The demonstration was made with the help of NASA’s Psyche spacecraft, which was launched on October 13 with the aim of exploring an asteroid of the same name. The DSOC experiment uses laser communications, as opposed to traditional radio frequencies, in an attempt to transfer large amounts of data at faster rates over longer distances. (The video is about Taters chasing a laser pointer. In 1928, a statue of the cartoon character Felix the Cat was used to test television transmissions.)
Transmitted data rates of 267 megabits per second are comparable to rates on Earth, which are typically between 100 and 300 megabits per second. But urged by Dr. Be cautious about the results of the demonstration.
“This is the first step,” he said. “There are still significant requirements for ground infrastructure and things like that to take something that’s kind of a proof of concept to turn it into something that works and is reliable.”
The video is sent using a flying laser transceiver, one of several pieces of new hardware being deployed for the first time. The DSOC system consists of three parts: the transceiver, installed aboard the Psyche spacecraft, and two parts on Earth: a ground laser transmitter (about a 90-minute drive from the laboratory) and a ground laser receiver at the Palomar Observatory in Southern California.
“It’s a little mind-blowing there that you can do all that at the end,” said Dr. Meera Srinivasan, the project lead operations.
Dr. Biswas and Dr. Srinivasan, along with other NASA engineers, has been working to develop this technology for decades. The focus is to augment the optical communications technology already used in satellites orbiting closer to Earth. At first, before the Psyche mission, the team jammed because the signal was too weak. So NASA developed technologies to expand those capabilities. Deep space, says Dr. Biswas, is “the new frontier.”
To start the process for cat video, the ground transmitter first transmits the laser beam. The aim must be precise. Psyche then locks onto that signal and sends the content, preloaded by the NASA team, back to the receiver. For the transmission to work, it had to be done on a cloudless night, which would allow a proper line of sight.
“There are many small steps,” said Dr. Biswas “Everybody has to fall into place at the right time. And that’s the scary part because we’re doing it for the first time. It’s never been done before. It’s not like, ‘Oh, we know if you do it, it will happen.’ that.’ We’re kind of working our way through all of these things.”
He added: “And then once it all works, it seems like it’s easy. Why were we worried in the first place?”
Now, the DSOC project is to test their limits. By the end of June, NASA engineers hope to be able to send from a distance 10 times farther: 186 million miles.
