Taters the Cat made history as a video of him chasing a laser was streamed from deep space by NASA in a first-of-its-kind experiment.
The orange and white tabby cat can be seeing jumping around a couch to catch a red laser dot in typical feline fashion, a 15-second video uploaded by NASA shows.
Although the video may appear to be like plenty of other cat videos on the internet, this particular one was beamed to Earth from 19 million miles away on Dec. 11.
NASA’s Deep Space Optical Communications experiment beamed an “ultra-high definition streaming video” as part of a project that will hopefully enable “future human missions beyond Earth’s orbit,” a press release said.
“This accomplishment underscores our commitment to advancing optical communications as a key element to meeting our future data transmission needs,” NASA Deputy Administrator Pam Melroy said.
Tates made his space debut through an instrument called a flight laser transceiver, which beamed an “encoded near-infrared laser” to the Hale Telescope at Caltech’s Palomar Observatory in San Diego County, California.
The video took 101 seconds to reach Earth, where it was then downloaded in the observatory and then sent “live” to the company’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, where the video was played in real time.
“Despite transmitting from millions of miles away, it was able to send the video faster than most broadband internet connections,” Ryan Rogalin, who worked on the project, said in a statement.
The video of Taters was uploaded before the launch of the Psyche mission on Oct. 13. The video includes graphics across the screen, including “this is a test” and even Taters’ breed and heart rate, as well as, Psyche’s orbital path, among other things.
Taters – who “everyone loves,” according to Rogalin – belongs to a Jet Propulsion Laboratory employee and the video was filmed on Earth.
The feline was picked as the team was inspired by the TV test broadcast in 1928 that showed Felix the Cat and because cat videos are quite popular online.