A cat video that’s truly out of this world

NASA streamed a cat video to Earth from 19 million miles away

On October 13, 2023, NASA launched a spacecraft on a six-year journey to reach a metal-rich asteroid known as Psyche, nestled between Mars and Jupiter. The mission’s primary goalis to understand the building blocks of planet formation by analyzing Psyche’s iron composition. But another technology demonstration piggybacked on the mission: The Deep Space Optical Communications experiment used an onboard flight laser transceiver to phone ultra-high definition video back to Earth, as part of an attempt to improve data-beaming capabilities.

During those experiments, on December 11, 2023, NASA streamed a preloaded 15-second test video from the spacecraft back to Earth — a journey of some 19 million miles. After 101 seconds, NASA received the high-res video, which displayed graphics including the spacecraft’s orbital path and technical information about the laser system. But the star of the show was undeniably an orange tabby named Taters, the feline companion of a NASA employee, who spent his 15 seconds of fame chasing a laser pointer on a couch. (The technical graphics were superimposed over Tater’s antics.) According to NASA, the successful demonstration proved that such technologies will be “essential to achieving our future exploration and science goals.” After all, Martian astronauts need to binge-watch cat videos, too.