NASA said on Monday that it has successfully returned over 19 million kilometers to Earth with an ultra-high definition footage of a cat named Taters.

A 15-second cat video was transmitted to Earth as part of a Deep Space Optical Communications experiment conducted by NASA. In order to facilitate future human expeditions beyond Earth’s orbit, the space agency intends to one day stream extremely high-bandwidth video and other data from deep space.

How was a Taters the Cat film sent into space?

Taters is not one of the animals that have really visited space, though others have, like the cat Félicette. The orange tabby belongs to an employee of Jet Propulsion Laboratory, NASA said.

Before it was launched in October, NASA’s $1.2 billion Psyche asteroid probe had the video of Taters pursuing a red dot with a laser pointer sent to it. Psyche is traveling 2.2 billion miles over six years to an asteroid that is uncommon and rich in metals, which may provide information about the formation of rocky planet cores like Earth.

On December 11, the Taters video transmission was launched toward the asteroid.

Demonstrating the capacity to send broadband video over vast distances is one of the objectives. We typically send packets of randomly produced test data because nothing on Psyche generates visual data, according to Bill Klipstein, the project manager for the tech demo 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.”

How was the Taters the Cat movie delivered all the way to Earth?

NASA reported that the footage was beamed as an encoded near-infrared laser from Psyche to the Hale Telescope at Caltech’s Palomar Observatory in San Diego County, California, using a device known as a flight laser transceiver.

According to NASA, the laser took just 101 seconds to reach Earth at the record-breaking transmission distance, which is roughly 80 times farther than the distance between Earth and the moon.
After downloading the film, every frame was forwarded to NASA’s Southern California Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where it was played back in real time.

“Despite transmitting from millions of miles away, it was able to send the video faster than most broadband internet connections,” 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.”

What implications does this have for upcoming space travel?

NASA describes the video’s successful transmission as a “historic milestone.” High-data-rate signals are being beamed back toward Earth as Psyche moves closer to the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. Enhanced capacity for communication from deep space may facilitate the transportation of people to Mars.

“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.”