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NASA uses laser to send video of a cat named Taters over 19 million miles (www.cbsnews.com)

submitted 9 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 47 points 9 months ago (13 children)

Bit annoying that they're more specific about latency than bandwidth. The laser had lower latency than broadband, but I want to know if the laser had enough bandwidth to stream the video.

[–] [email protected] 38 points 9 months ago (3 children)

This latest milestone comes after “first light” was achieved on Nov. 14. Since then, the system has demonstrated faster data downlink speeds and increased pointing accuracy during its weekly checkouts. On the night of Dec. 4, the project demonstrated downlink bit rates of 62.5 Mbps, 100 Mbps, and 267 Mbps, which is comparable to broadband internet download speeds. The team was able to download a total of 1.3 terabits of data during that time. As a comparison, NASA’s Magellan mission to Venus downlinked 1.2 terabits during its entire mission from 1990 to 1994.

https://www.nasa.gov/directorates/stmd/tech-demo-missions-program/deep-space-optical-communications-dsoc/nasas-tech-demo-streams-first-video-from-deep-space-via-laser/

[–] [email protected] 7 points 9 months ago (2 children)

Honestly the 1.2 TB I'm the early 90s is an insanely impressive figure to me. I mean in that era a gigabyte seemed like an obscene amount of data, the interat ran at less than 56 kbps, and I don't think I had a 1GB drive in my hime PC until almost the turn of the millennium. Sending and storing that much from venus is a huge accomplishment.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

1.2 Tb* ~ 150GB

Still impressive though

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

They probably stored it on tape which was slow but could hold an impressive amount of data.

I remember my first multi gig hard drive. I was blown away that I could fully install Diablo 2, Fallout 2, and a cracked version of 3d Studio Max at the same time. No more changing disks!

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