What’s Taters, precious?
Spoil em, flash em, laser out a few.
Damn, beat me to it
Using a laser they could just as well send the cat. He would follow the laser just as well.
Guess what the cat is doing in the video
Taxes?
Faster than light travel achieved
Video beamed. Video intercepted by aliens. Think cats rule earth.
They’re right.
They’d have to be really close. This doesn’t even get close to Mars or Venus.
They are.
whistles x-files theme
So correct.
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.
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.
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.
1.2 Tb* ~ 150GB
Still impressive though
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!
Lower latency than broadband…?
If you’re getting >100s ping times you might want to have them come out to check your lines.
Something tells me you’re not getting sub 100ms latency with broadband over 19 million miles
They’re new high tech lasers that go faster than the speed of light!
Actually, most latency issues at that scale are due to the relays themselves. Earth diameter is only 42 light-ms
19 million miles is 102 light seconds.
I mean, if their point was that a straight-shot laser had lower point-to-point latency than a system with a bunch of non-direct links, intermediate switches, routers, mix of copper and fiber, etc… Well, no kidding.
Didn’t say anything about 100ms though. I was guessing maybe they read 100ms though. Still not sure what the point was.
"The video was then downloaded and each frame was sent to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, where it was played in real time. "
It sounds like it. Laser comm can have some insanely high data rates due to the high frequency of the radiation.
if you want more bandwidth you can just use more lasers
More lasers!!!
What strikes me is not the bandwidth achieved but the precision of the technology to aim the laser. 19 million miles is a great distance to successfully aim a beam of light. As this technology develops, real time communications with objects in orbit like around Mars will be possible.
Well realtime is just not true. But cool technology nonetheless.
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It’s really not at these scales. Earth and Mars go from roughly 4 light minutes apart to over 20.
At the best case, saying something and then waiting 8 minutes for a response is hardly what I’d call “real time”.
Speed of light is insanely slow at the cosmic scale.
No, it’s not slow, at all. It’s the speed of light.
Unfortunately for us humans, we are a relatively fast form of life, when compared against the scale of our solar system, much less our galaxy, even when communicating at the speed of light.
It’s the fastest speed information can go through space, as far as we know. Unfortunately, there’s a lot of space. And a mean a LOT.
I’m wondering if we will need to tweak our Internet protocols to include interplanetary time? I would imagine mirroring would be much more important. Because light can only go so fast.
Yes, the high latency and intermittent connectivity is a big challenge. Delay tolerant networking (DTN) is one good way of solving this problem.
I think the issue, again will be date and time.
DDMMYYYY + Planet + Orbit?
software developers are seething
UTC and forget
I’m sure several OSI layers have already been modified by NASA to suit their needs. But, the protocols will pretty much remain standard.
The beam is reeeealy wide by the time it gets there. Still a great achivement, though.
I presume that we’re not yet concerned with what the Ansible tech awoke in the vast emptiness between, hmm?
Despite transmitting from millions of miles away, it was able to send the video faster than most broadband internet connections
That guy must be a Spectrum subscriber
The article isn’t terribly long, but here is the direct link to Taters https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GvJtVOmFs5Q
Thank you, I came here for the cat tax.
Thank goodness for “this is a test”. For a moment I was panicking about an invasion of space cats and their terrifying laser hunting capabilities.
That’s awesome
“We’re receiving coherent signals from the edge of the Milky Way.”
“Life can exist in such isolation? What are they saying, do they need rescue?”
“It’s a video of a small fuzzy animal.”
“What?”
“When we probed deeper to get more context, we found millions of such videos, supposedly they’re cherished non-intelligient companions and the people there wished to express that.”
"…
…
What?"
This strikes me with a “They’re made of meat?!” vibe.
The MCRN & UNN would be proud.
Can’t wait til we can start watching interplanetary wars play out in real time.
Pretty sure it won’t be in real time with all the light delay.
Can we have space settlement without the war and genocide? It’s not like killing Indians and robbing trains is a fundamental requirement.
That depends on if space is colonized by homo sapiens, or by an evolved form of ants, who rise up millions of years after humans have gone extinct.
The civilization that evolved from ants possibly could.
Humans? Doubtful.
You are giving ants way too much credit. Those fuckers are brutal war criminals, the lot of them. Humans are bad, but we’ve had nukes for almost 80 years without glassing ourselves, ants wouldn’t last a day
No, because I’m assuming that one colony will wipe out the rest and earth will be ruled by the hereditary line of matriarchs of whatever the queen ant evolves into.
They’ll probably enslave and brutalize all other species on the planet, but they’ll rule earth as a single unified colony, and space as an extension of that.
They need to be harnessed into biological CPUs by hyper-advanced dog sized jumping spiders. It’s the only use for those murderous six legged maniacs.
Somewhere on my work wiki is a picture of puppies that I sent over SWIFT to a bank to test that the relationship was setup properly.
Cats and dogs are always acceptable test messages
This tracks
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This is the correct use of technology. (But later let’s test the ping on Doom over laserlan)
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Taters is very precious!!
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“What’s Taters?”
“Po-ta-toes… Boil um mash um stick um in a stew!”
Taters, star surfer
That is cute. But why a cat?
Because cute
Right. I guess I kinda agree.
Joke answer: It’s cute.
Real answer: It’s cute and because of that broad appeal it’s easy good PR. NASA has to appeal to the populace to hope they demand their Representatives properly fund them.
