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Nasa beamed ultra-high definition video of a cat named Taters back to Earth from nearly 19 million miles away, the space agency said Monday.
The 15-second cat video was sent to Earth as an experiment for NASA's Deep Space Optical Communications. The space agency hopes to one day stream very high-bandwidth video and other data from deep space, enabling future human missions beyond Earth's orbit.
While animals, including a cat named Félicette, have actually been to space, Taters is not one of them. A Jet Propulsion Laboratory employee owns the orange tabby, according to NASA.
The video of Taters chasing the red dot of a laser pointer was uploaded to NASA's $1.2 billion Psyche asteroid probe before it was launched in October. Psyche is on a six-year, 2.2-billion-mile voyage to a rare, metal-rich asteroid that may hold clues about how the cores of rocky planets like Earth first formed.
The Taters video transmission was carried out on Dec. 11 en route to the asteroid.
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.
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