Everyone knows that the most important part of a tech demo is to make the right impression, and the team over at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) definitely had this part nailed down when they showed off streaming a cat video from deep space using laser technology as part of NASA’s Deep Space Optical Communication (DSOC) program. This system consists out of a ground-based laser transmitter and receiver along with a space-based laser transceiver, which for this experiment was positioned at a distance of 31 million kilometers – 80 times the distance between the Moon and Earth – as a part of the Psyche spacecraft.
After a range of tests with the system to shake out potential issues, the team found that they could establish a 267 Mbps link, with a one-way latency of a mere 101 seconds, allowing Psyche’s transceiver to transmit the preinstalled 15-second high-definition video in effectively real-time and making the cat Taters instantly world-famous. Although the potential for space-based cat videos cannot be underestimated, the main purpose of DSOC is to allow spacecraft to send back much larger data sets than they could before.
For robotic and potential future manned missions DSOC would mean high bandwidth video and data links, enabling more science, better communication and possibly the occasional cat video during interplanetary travel.
If the aliens intercept it, they’ll think we’re a planet of cats.
Actually it was first picture of aliens, so obviously they intercepted it and sent pussy instead.
E=mc2 says that interstellar travel is vanity project! ;)
Which means they’ll never visit us because they’ll think that as soon as they land we’ll push them off the edge.
Let’s hope they’re not from Sirius.
Shirley you aren’t Sirius…
I am serious, and don’t call me Shirley.
When I see those UAP videos I always think that instead of some laws-of-physics defying stuff it looks more akin to the navy/airforce chasing a laser dot kind of projection.
Maybe it’s aliens and NASA put them up to it :)
Incidentally, it also made me think how all animals like to chase balls, like dogs and cats and humans alike, and how much joy they get out of it, whcih made me wonder if any potential alien life would by evolutionary necessity share that behavioral feature. It would make sense since we all start by chasing things and getting positive feedback from catching what we chase.
So aliens visitors would possibly come for our sports.
Free space optical data links what more can you say than fantastic I can hardly wait to see what it will bring.
Cat videos, lots of them.
Better LEO constellations.
Kudos Maya!
This is the funniest thing I’ve read all week!
“Although the potential for space-based cat videos cannot be underestimated,…”
The pinnacle of mankind’s technological achievements!
I couldn’t help thinking of this:
Russell: But without an emotional component, computers would strip us of all humanity and create a society with emotionless eggheads at the top and idiots with feelings at the bottom, and I refuse to let that happen, and that’s why I’ve spent…Wait – What is that?
Britta: It’s a video of a kitten.
Russell: And why are those people arguing about it? And what’s that?
Abed: That’s an emoticon. That person wants to indicate happiness but can’t convey it with language, so they misuse punctuation to form a smile.
Russell: That is so… stupid. Only an idiot would think of this. Idiots won, which means my work down here is done.
I never thought of Russel Brand in that way and i wonder what triggered your amazon alexa enabled Britta filter to talk…
Russel Borchert. From the show Community
And… was written AFTER invention of internet, so it is not valid as a nonhumor.
The backstory is that Russel Borchert sealed himself off from the world in the 1980’s, and has no knowledge of the internet. After being unsealed, the very first thing he sees on the internet is a cat video and the accompanying comment section.
My first thought on reading this was that it referred to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell%27s_teapot, but then I got thoroughly confused. Glad to see the explanation.
A goddamn satellite has a faster “Internet” connection than my house
To be fair, their monthly bill is a lot higher too
I mean, yeah, of course, not sure why that’s a surprise given that the internet is often delivered via satellite to remote area?
If you are willing to pay the same startup costs and monthly maintenance costs for your home internet as you would need for a satellite, I’m pretty sure your home internet connection has plenty of options to be improved. How much are you willing to spend?
“with a one-way latency of a mere 101 seconds”
The funny thing is that they can’t really know this for sure. All they know is that two-way latency is 202 seconds.
see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-way_speed_of_light
Yeah, if the earth was moving towards the laser, the return path would be shorter.
“A goddamn satellite has a faster “Internet” connection than my house”
Yea…. that’s what I was thinking also…. :(
MUCH, MUCH faster(3Mb here….on a good day)
And lucky to have that. Gota love Frontier ADSL= over $80 a month.
Faster? ….. would you be happy with the 101 seconds latency?
Isn’t Starlink something like 130$ per month? With over 100Mbps DL?
It isn’t laser, but it is from space!
Yikes, what frontier are you exploring? Some remote cave? Do you have to scream your packets into a speaking tube?
Semaphore to a spy satellite.
Smoke signals were 0.2 baud, flag signals were 0.5 baud and semaphore to a satellite is instantaneous, as someone’s always watching.
Oof, 3Mbps for 80 dollars a month?!
Can’t you like, complain to your (local) government that you need better communications technology? i live in central EU and in the last few years they’ve really been squeezing every last drop out of the infrastructure, while they are also replacing the entire thing with optic fibre now (as opposed to bolting those networks onto the sides of existing infrastructure like they did before)
These days i get 400Mbps down (only 40Mbps up tho) for like 35 bucks a month & my country (NL) isn’t even top 10 anymore when it comes to internet speeds. I can get a 2way 8Gbps connection for 85 bucks a month but honestly i wouldn’t even know what to use that for haha. (and at that point you’re really just throwing away money because very few services/servers will be able to supply the 8Gbps i could technically download, not to even mention hardware limitations, some of my older hdd’s would literally choke haha)
Ahhh, so you dont live at the end of s 50 year old cable connection neighborhood?
No, the money to pay for it would be taxed out of you at an unaffordable rate. Federal subsidies help in the USA but otherwise…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zi8VTeDHjcM
The interplanetary internet is also made of cats.
Can someone explain how a beam of light (ie. laser), is
somehow miraculously quicker than an RF signal ???
(aren’t they both electromagnetic radiation, albeit, the
laser being unidirectional). Their velocity should both
be equal to “c”. Why is one form advantageous over
the other form ?
Not quite grasping this “invention”.
The short wavelength of light permits ridiculously high gain antennas (“telescopes”) to be used, making up in part for the ludicrously high noise, awful filters available at that frequency, the requirement for super-accurate pointing stability, and the need for exotic photon-counting detectors. Despite the drawbacks, there are use cases where light is favored over longer wave EM radiation.
“Although the potential for space-based cat videos cannot be underestimated”….
In the wrong hands this technology could become cat-as-trophic!
It’d be the apurrcalypse we deserve, to be honest.
I would have preferred a cat playing a piano video.
Too BGT
I never comment on here, but so many people are missing the point of why this is a big deal. The 101 seconds of latency is due to the distance of the spacecraft from Earth, not a technology limitation.
You’re talking about presently 23,762,588 kilometers away or 0.158843 AU and traveling up to 1 AU for the demonstration as the spacecraft continues its journey. The latency is due to speed of light limitations, and you just watched a 15 second clip streamed realtime from that distance at the maximum 267 Mbps speed capability, which is amazing. This isn’t replacing satellite technology around Earth.
Very cool, would love to hear more details about how they can modulate the optical signal to get data rates this high. Also makes one think about the potential of free space optical comms on earth, imagine a mesh of laser links passing uncensorable (the enemy wouldn’t know where the beams were unless right on their line, a low power laser in clean un-foggy air isn’t visible from the side) internet connections in to totalitarian states…
All you miscreants, just quit it with the ridiculous, moronic cat “humor”
(and that’s using the term loosely).
To answer the comment regarding broadband on earth vs the DSOC, the
baseband carrier is lightwaves (laser) in the thz range. Therefore more data
capacity, vs. RF (in the ghz) range.
Confusing article, we’re talking about bandwidth, not TOA of the information.
RF > electromagnetic radiation
light (laser) > electromagnetic radiation
latency (time of arrival) are equivalent to ” c ”
Although (unless it was missed), no mention of the modulation waveform.
(does it have embedded error correction ? is it anti-jam ? etc)
It’s pulse-position modulated, and heavy on the error correction coding. Close to optimum use of bandwidth, says JPL. Or as close as you can come with on-off keying and barn-door filters, I suppose.
Still, they claim the coding permits recovery of signals 7 dB below the optical noise floor.
The optical filters used are still dozens of GHz wide, letting in all sorts of noise though.
I look forward to the day when we can do low-loss optical mixing and ultra-narrowband filtering so we can do optical communications properly.
We get closer with every passing decade… Until then, free space optical communications will remain a niche application.
The public-facing website information does a disservice and seriously under-represents just how much of a technical achievement this really is.
The spacecraft is transmitting just 4 watts of power in infrared laser light. The information it transmits is in quantized packets (photons): The receiver must disambiguate photons from the spacecraft from scattered light in the atmosphere, background starlight, and receiver electronic noise. The last is minimized by operating the photodetector near absolute zero, reducing thermal noise and making the receiver superconducting. Optical filters remove most of the noise from other sources, but daylight would still be a challenge.
The transmitter telescope helps by concentrating that 4 watts into a diffraction-limited sub-arc-second beam width, about 2000 km wide when it hits Earth. The spacecraft, nearly dead-silent in space isn’t quiet or stable enough by itself: the transmitter must be mounted on a stabilization platform to ensure it can hit the target on Earth, helped by tracking a powerful beacon laser sent from the ground. The transmitter also must *lead*, because the earth-bound target is moving along at 30 km/second, so moves 6000 km (3 beamwidths) between the time the beacon was sent and the time the spacecraft signal hits the ground again.
Even after all that it’s still a statistical counting exercise. Even with the huge 200-inch Palomar telescope being the collection bucket, it’s still collecting just a few photons per bit.
It’s quite a feat to make this all work, and kudos are due to the team that pulled it off.
It will be interesting to see where it makes sense to apply it, and how it will scale for farther probes, and whether (say) millimeter-wave will be an easier solution.
Thank you for that information, Paul. You’re right that the PR fluff piece is not helpful at all in understanding what this technology means, other than ‘more bits, more better’. For just 4 watt of transmit power at that distance that’s an amazing achievement, indeed.