NASA has transmitted an ultra-high definition streaming video from the Psyche mission spacecraft at a distance of 19 million miles from Earth.
The space agency said Monday that the transmission is part of its Deep Space Optical Communications experiment, which seeks to demonstrate a laser communication capability meant to transmit data from deep space at up to 100 times faster than the rates that state-of-the-art radio frequency systems can offer.
The video was beamed from the flight laser transceiver aboard the Psyche spacecraft to the Hale Telescope at the California Institute of Technology’s Palomar Observatory in the form of an encoded infrared laser with a bit rate of 267 megabits per second.
The video is a looped footage of a cat belonging to a Jet Propulsion Laboratory employee. The video shows the cat chasing a laser pointer while overlayed graphics show various types of information related to the Psyche mission.
After reaching Palomar, the video was sent via the internet to the JPL at a speed slower than its transmission from deep space, according to JPL’s Ryan Rogalin, leader of the project’s receiver electronics. The video had taken 101 seconds to travel from the Psyche spacecraft to Earth.
The transmission of high data rate signals will continue up to the farthest distance of Mars from Earth as the Psyche mission heads to its target asteroid between Mars and Jupiter.
