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Nasa beams cat video into deep space with a laser

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Nasa beams cat video from deep space with laser

You might think it would be im-paw-sibble to get a cat into space - well Nasa has made it their mission.

Using a special laser, they beamed a video of a cat into deep space, while the cat was able to remain safely here on Earth.

The video of Taters - an orange tabby - has travelled 19 million miles.

Taters' owner works for Nasa, in the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in California.

Why is Nasa beaming a video of a cat into space?

Image source, Nasa/JPL-Caltech
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As well as a video of Taters, the footage also showed technical information that Nasa scientists would need to send across space in the future

Nasa was testing some of it's newest technology.

Scientists wanted to see how far they could project a new laser and what better image to send than a cat?

They hope the laser can be used in the future to communicate with shuttles in remote parts of the solar system.

The laser is pretty powerful, and the video of Taters has travelled around 80 times the distance between Earth to the Moon.

Everyone in the lab apparently "loves" Taters, and as well as the video of him, his breed, heart rate and age were also sent in the video transmission.

You can watch the video at the top of the page.

Despite transmitting from millions of miles away, it was able to send the video faster than most broadband internet connections

— Ryan Rogalin, Nasa JPL electronics lead

It's all a part of Nasa's DSOC mission. It stands for Deep Space Orbital Communications.

This mission hopes to find a way to communicate across distances longer than Earth and the Moon.