It is one small paw print for Taters the cat, one giant leap for mankind.
An adorable video of the orange and white tabby made history after it was beamed down to Earth from deep space.
The 15-second clip was sent from NASA’s Psyche asteroid probe on Dec. 11 — and traveled 19 million miles, the space agency announced Monday.
The video, which features the kitty chasing a red dot from a laser pointer, was uploaded to the $1.2 billion spacecraft before it was launched in October.
It’s the first time NASA has streamed high-definition video from deep space, and it downloaded quicker than most Internet connections on Earth.
“Despite transmitting from millions of miles away, it was able to send the video faster than most broadband Internet connections,” Ryan Rogalin, who worked on the project, said in a statement.
The HD footage was sent from Psyche as it traveled to an asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. The footage was delivered via a new cutting-edge laser instrument and took only 101 seconds to reach our planet.
The orange and white tabby cat, Taters, can be seeing jumping around a couch to catch a red laser dot in typical feline fashion, a 15-second video uploaded by NASA shows. YouTube/JPLrawScientists hope the technological achievement can pave the way for the next scientific breakthrough: humans traveling to other planets.
The first-of-its-kind experiment by NASA’s Deep Space Optical Communication was as part of a project that will hopefully enable “future human missions beyond Earth’s orbit,” according to a press release.
“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,” said NASA Deputy Administrator Pam Melroy.
Although the video may appear to be like plenty of other cat videos on the internet, this particular one was beamed to Earth from 19 million miles away on Dec. 11. YouTube/JPLraw
Tates made his space debut through an instrument called a flight laser transceiver, which beamed an “encoded near-infrared laser” to the Hale Telescope at Caltech’s Palomar Observatory in San Diego County, California. The video took 101 seconds to reach Earth, where it was then downloaded in the observatory and then sent “live” to the company’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, where the video was played in real time. X/@NASAJPLResearchers on the project said they usually send “packets of randomly generated test data” but this time decided to use the cat video.
“To make this significant event more memorable, we decided to work with designers at [the Jet Propulsion Laboratory] to create a fun video, which captures the essence of the demo as part of the Psyche mission,” said Bill Klipstein, the tech demo’s project manager.
The cute clip was filmed on Earth and was uploaded before the launch of the Psyche mission on Oct. 13.
The footage also shows Taters’ breed and heart rate, as well as Psyche’s orbital path, among other information.
The video of Taters was uploaded before the launch of the Psyche mission on Oct. 13. The video includes graphics across the screen, including “this is a test” and even Taters’ breed and heartrate, as well as, Psyche’s orbital path, among other things. NASA/JPL-CaltechTaters made his space debut through an instrument called a flight laser transceiver, which beamed an “encoded near-infrared laser” to the Hale Telescope at Caltech’s Palomar Observatory in San Diego County, Calif.
The video was downloaded in the observatory and then sent “live” to the company’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, where the video was played in real-time.
Taters — whom “everyone loves,” according to Rogalin — belongs to an employee of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
The frontier feline was picked as the team was inspired by the TV test broadcast in 1928 that showed Felix the Cat.
Also, who doesn’t love a cat video?
