Just Another Cat Video -- Streamed From 19 Million Miles Away

Okay, I'm a sucker for geek stuff. This video is better quality than what a lot of us get from what passes for local broadband, but it was beamed from deep space. That's pretty cool. Via CBS News:

The 15-second cat video was sent to Earth as an experiment for NASA's Deep Space Optical Communications. The space agency hopes to one day stream very high-bandwidth video and other data from deep space, enabling future human missions beyond Earth's orbit.

While animals, including a cat named Félicette, have actually been to space, Taters is not one of them. A Jet Propulsion Laboratory employee owns the orange tabby, according to NASA.

The video of Taters chasing the red dot of a laser pointer was uploaded to NASA's $1.2 billion Psyche asteroid probe before it was launched in October. Psyche is on a six-year, 2.2-billion-mile voyage to a rare, metal-rich asteroid that may hold clues about how the cores of rocky planets like Earth first formed.

What does it all mean?

"One of the goals is to demonstrate the ability to transmit broadband video across millions of miles. Nothing on Psyche generates video data, so we usually send packets of randomly generated test data," Bill Klipstein, the tech demo's project manager at JPL, said. "But to make this significant event more memorable, we decided to work with designers at JPL to create a fun video, which captures the essence of the demo as part of the Psyche mission."

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