Cats, cows, birds and pigs. Photos and videos of several NASA employees’ pets flew through space last May. but why?
During space missions, NASA sends a lot of data from Earth to space and back again. This has been done via radio waves since the first space missions. This is moving very quickly, at least 300 million meters per second. In fact: the speed of light. However, there is still a need for a better way to transfer data. It has been tested now. With pictures of cats.
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It sends infrared rays NASA pets
Astronauts Randy Bresnik, Christina Koch, Kjell Lindgren, and other NASA employees collected photos and videos of their beloved pets for the experiment. It was sent to the International Space Station (ISS) via infrared. This radiation, like radio waves, travels at the speed of light. However, you can pack more information into it. This is because infrared waves are shorter together than radio radiation waves.
NASA believes that such “laser communication” is becoming increasingly necessary. Space tools are getting better, so their batch data files are getting larger as well. In order to get those files to Earth in a timely manner, the transmission process must be faster than it is now. Using a laser, the speed increases from ten to a hundred times.
The pets were sent to the space station at 1.2 gigabit speed. This is faster than most Internet connections in people’s homes.
Quite a distance
But it didn’t happen easily. The footage was captured on a computer in Las Cruces, New Mexico. From there, NASA sent the data to stations in California and Hawaii, where they have the equipment to convert images of pets into infrared. It was sent more than 35,400 kilometers into the air, to the so-called Laser Communications Relay Demonstration, which orbits the Earth. This device sent laser beams back to ILLUMA-T, located outside the International Space Station. Once there, the infrared can be converted back to the original footage.
In December 2023 NASA has already achieved something similar. They then sent a 4K video of “Taters the Cat” from space to Earth. The video covered a distance of no less than 31 million kilometers. This is equivalent to about eighty times the distance from Earth to the Moon. The video took 101 seconds to reach the ground. The playful cat flew towards our planet at a speed of 267 megabits per second.
source: NASA
Image: NASA
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