In October 2023 NASA launched the Psyche spacecraft, headed for a metal-rich asteroid of the same name. However, it had a secondary mission: streaming cat videos back to Earth.
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00:00In October 2023, NASA launched the Psyche spacecraft, headed for a metal-rich asteroid
00:09of the same name.
00:10That journey would take six years as the human-made craft traveled to the area between Mars and
00:14Jupiter.
00:15However, the spacecraft had another mission as well, test out NASA's high-speed laser-based
00:19data transmission system.
00:21Its first historic transmission took place later that year, with Psyche sending not just
00:25a message back to Earth on the backs of lasers, but also this video of a cat named Taters.
00:29The Deep Space Optical Communications, or DSOC, was a proof of concept, but it could
00:34be the future of space communication.
00:36That's because lasers are a much tighter communication method, unlike radio that spreads and deteriorates
00:41over vast distances.
00:42It is also traveling at near-light speed, magnitudes faster than radio as well.
00:47For reference, Voyager 1, which is currently in interstellar space some 15.6 billion miles
00:52away, currently takes 22.5 hours just to contact using conventional methods.
00:59NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology