On December 11, 2023, NASA scientists gathered to watch a 15-second video of an orange tabby cat named Taters chasing a red laser light. This clip wasn’t just adorable. It was also the first video ever streamed from deep space—the region of space beyond our moon.
The video was beamed back to Earth from the Psyche spacecraft, which was launched in October 2023 to study a metal-rich asteroid. A device on board fired a concentrated beam of light encoded with the video. The laser transmission traveled nearly 31 million kilometers (19 million miles) in only 101 seconds.
Broadcasting this prerecorded video of Taters is part of NASA’s experiments to improve the speed and quantity of data that can be transmitted from deep space. This could be helpful “for a future when humans are on Mars,” says Lindy Elkins-Tanton, a planetary scientist directing the Psyche mission. Laser communication technology may allow people to keep in contact with those back home on Earth.