The innovation could transform how spacecraft communicate on interplanetary missions, NASA said, and it is already being prepared for use by the next astronauts who go to the moon. It would allow broadband video, scientific information and high-definition imagery to be sent home from distances far beyond the moon, and at high speeds.
“What we’ve done is taken this technology that’s been used in satellites orbiting near-Earth and around the moon … and extended that range out to deep space,” said Malcolm Wright, flight laser lead at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. “This demonstration we just did … is really showing the ability of the technology.”
The video was sent by NASA’s Deep Space Optical Communications flight laser transceiver, which hitched a ride to deep space on Psyche, a spacecraft on a mission to the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. It took 101 seconds for the video signal to reach Earth, NASA said.
The clip of Taters playing with a laser pointer — a popular cat toy and a nod to the laser technology used for transmission — was the first in a series of experiments planned with Psyche over the next two years. Every week, as the spacecraft gets farther from Earth, NASA scientists and engineers will try the video transmission at greater distances, reaching about the distance of Mars mid-2024, Wright said.
“The biggest thing now is to show the reliability and the robustness,” Wright told The Washington Post. “So it’s not just a novelty, a one-off, but it can be a workhorse. We want to show the capability.”
At 19 million miles away, Psyche was a small fraction of the distance to Mars when it sent the cat video. The signal arrived at the Hale Telescope at the California Institute of Technology’s Palomar Observatory, where it was downloaded and sent to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where the video played.
The teams at the observatory and lab communicated over Zoom as the video arrived at the lab, Wright recounted. When it came through, excitement spread.
“You think of everything that can go wrong beforehand. … [Then] you’re like, ‘Oh my goodness, it all works,’” Wright said. “It makes all the years of work and effort worth it.”
Taters, for his part, didn’t work quite so hard.
The 3-year-old tabby belongs to Joby Harris, a visual strategist for the NASA laboratory’s design team, which uses art to communicate missions to the public. The team was tasked with coming up with a meaningful but fun video to beam back to Earth, he said.
The designers wanted to hang on to classic NASA technical images, such as the text “This is a test.” They were also inspired by broadcast history, Harris said: In the early days of television, a statue of the cartoon Felix the Cat was featured in broadcast tests.
With that in mind, the designers thought of using a cat chasing a laser because the mission involved lasers. Harris uploaded a video of his cat as a placeholder, never intending to actually use it. But his team “kept coming back to it, how charming and simple it was,” he said.
They wanted a higher-quality clip, so Harris went home and staged a room for a video shoot. He put up lights and cameras. He put fresh batteries in the laser pointer.
Taters, of course, wanted nothing to do with it.
“He knew something was up,” Harris said. “I tried for an hour to just get him to play.”
The cat refused. Frustrated, Harris took down all the equipment. When he returned to the living room, Taters was lounging on the couch. He looked so perfectly posed that Harris got out his phone.
And Taters “went crazy with the laser pointer.”
Though the team members were nervous about whether the public would like the video as much as they did, Harris said it seems to have been successful.
“Communicating via light is pretty complex, but how do you get people talking about it? You just get people talking about things that they normally talk about,” Harris said. “Art is simply … building bridges of complex things to as many people as possible — and I can’t think of anything that would do that more than, perhaps, cats.”
Unlike Taters’s toy, the laser sent up to space is infrared and invisible to the eye. Wright’s team at the observatory points a laser to the spacecraft, whose instrument then beams an encoded laser down. The data travels along the laser signal rather than radio waves, similar to how fiber-optic high-speed internet works, Wright said. The data can move much more quickly than through radio transmission.
“Going to use lasers is sort of like what we’ve done with fiber optics on the ground,” Wright said. “The challenge is there’s no fiber out to space, of course. So you have to do it by line of sight.”
Aiming the laser at the spacecraft so the transceiver knows where to point back is the most difficult part, Wright said. And because Earth and the spacecraft are both moving, the lasers must point to where the destination will be in a few minutes.
“The beam’s so narrow, it can’t just point to Earth. It needs to know exactly where on Earth,” Wright said. “Trying to hit a dime from a mile away while you’re moving at 17,000 miles an hour — that’s the challenge.”
Psyche was launched on Oct. 13 and will take about six years to reach the asteroid belt. For at least two years, the NASA engineers and scientists plan to continue testing the transceiver. After a break this month for the holidays, they’ll run a test every Monday, Wright said. For the next one, in January, Psyche will be up to 30 million miles away.
As for Taters, he has been too busy napping to hear about his growing fame.
“He would call himself a laser beam motion analyst,” said Harris. “I think he’s just happy to help out.”
