On December 11, NASA engineers eagerly gathered at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, to watch a video of a cat, wondering if it would be in the pristine high definition they expected.
To his relief, it was. For the first time, high-definition video (this one of a lab employee's cat named Taters) was beamed from 18.6 million miles away, or about 80 times the distance between Earth and the Moon, the farthest ever. view.
The demonstration was part of the NASA program. Deep Space Optical Communications experiment, aimed at improving communication infrastructure beyond Earth's orbit. For example, if humans are going to Mars, there is a need to transmit larger amounts of data over greater distances. This demonstration marked another step towards such a possibility.
“This would be the same capability you would want to have if you were sending an astronaut to the surface of Mars or something like that,” said Dr. Abhijit Biswas, the project's technologist. “You want to have constant contact with them.”
The demonstration was carried out 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 speeds and over greater distances. (The video shows Taters chasing a laser pointer. In 1928, a statue of the cartoon character Felix the Cat was used to test tech-called-television/” title=”” rel=”noopener noreferrer” target=”_blank”>television broadcasts.)
The data transmission speed of 267 megabits per second is comparable to the speed on Earth, which typically ranges between 100 and 300 megabits per second. But Dr Biswas urged caution over 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 sort of a proof of concept and transform it into something that's operational and reliable.”
The video was transmitted using a flight laser transceiver, one of several pieces of new hardware being implemented for the first time. The DSOC system is made up of three parts: the transceiver, which was installed aboard the Psyche spacecraft, and two components on Earth: a ground-based laser transmitter (about a 90-minute drive from the laboratory) and a ground-based laser receiver. at the Palomar Observatory in Southern California.
“It's kind of mind-blowing that you can do all that in the end,” said Dr. Meera Srinivasan, the project's operations leader.
Dr. Biswas and Dr. Srinivasan, along with other NASA engineers, have been working to develop this technology for decades. The goal was to expand optical communications technology already in use on satellites orbiting much closer to Earth. Initially, before the Psyche mission, the team ran into obstacles because the signal was too weak. So NASA developed technologies to expand capabilities. Deep space, Dr. Biswas said, was “the new frontier.”
To begin the cat video process, the ground transmitter first sent out the laser beam. The objective had to be precise. Psyche then locked on to that signal and sent the content, which had been preloaded by the NASA team, back to the receiver. For the transmission to work, it needed to be done during a cloudless night, which would allow for adequate line of sight.
“There are a lot of small steps,” Dr. Biswas said. “Each one has to fit in at the right time. And that's the scary part because we're doing it for the first time. This has not been done before. It's not like, 'Oh, we know that if you do this, that will happen.' “We’re working our way through all of these things.”
He added: “And once everything works, it seems very easy. Why were we worried in the first place?
Now, the DSOC project aims to test its limits. By the end of June, NASA engineers hope to be able to transmit from a distance 10 times greater: 300 million kilometers.
