Viral Science Star
Taters
2023
The ginger tabby whose video was beamed 19 million miles across deep space by laser
- Owner
- NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory
- Years
- 2023
- Known for
- Viral Science Star
Taters is an orange tabby who, in December 2023, became the unlikely star of a genuine milestone in space communication. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory used the cat as the subject of the first-ever high-definition video streamed from deep space by laser, as part of its Deep Space Optical Communications (DSOC) experiment aboard the Psyche spacecraft.
The 15-second ultra-high-definition clip — showing Taters, who belongs to a JPL employee, chasing a laser dot across a sofa, overlaid with playful graphics about the cat's heart rate and the technology itself — had been uploaded to the spacecraft before launch. It was then transmitted back to Earth from roughly 19 million miles away (about 80 times the distance to the Moon) using a near-infrared laser. The signal took about 101 seconds to arrive and reached Earth faster than most home broadband connections, downloading at 267 megabits per second.
NASA chose a cat video quite deliberately, nodding to the internet's endless appetite for feline content while demonstrating a technology that could one day carry high-bandwidth communication from crewed missions to Mars. Taters, chasing a laser in a way instantly familiar to any cat owner, turned an abstract engineering triumph into something the whole world could smile at.