NASA on Monday announced it had used a state-of-the-art laser communication system on a spaceship 19 million miles (31 million kilometers) away from Earth – to send a high-definition cat video.
When it sent the video, the spaceship was 80 times the distance between the Earth and Moon.
"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," said Bill Klipstein, the tech demo's project manager at JPL.
Aiming a laser beam from millions of miles away requires extremely precise "pointing," a major technical hurdle engineering teams had to solve.

NASA Has Beamed The First High-Def Video Across 19 Million Miles. Featuring a Cat.