There’s a certain brand of humour that inspires Vietnam-style flashbacks in anyone who was active on the internet in the mid-2000s or early 2010s. The finger moustache. Le epic bacon. Narwhals, for some reason (although, IRL, narwhals are objectively lovely creatures). Unfortunately for the feline community, cats were also drafted into this offensive – not just the cats of old, but cats with memeable faces, or lasers shooting from their eyes, or cats performing funny stunts that could be clipped into bite-sized videos on emerging social media platforms. Even now, every cute cat video is slightly tainted by its cultural lineage.

Alas, the scientists at NASA – where the average age reportedly hovers around the mid-40s – either don’t remember or don’t care about triggering the millennial fight-or-flight response. How do we know this? Well, the space agency recently beamed an ultra-HD video of an orange tabby cat back to Earth from a distance of 19 million miles. In other words, they’re paving the way to distribute the depths of Reddit humour across the stars.

Memetic terror isn’t the actual goal, obviously. The 15-second clip of “Taters the cat” was sent 80 times the distance between Earth and the moon via laser in an effort to improve communication with the furthest reaches of the solar system. Taters, who is aptly shown chasing a laser pointer, is actually owned by an employee at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in California, but luckily remained on Earth while the project took place.

The video of Taters was uploaded to a spacecraft launched via SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket on October 13, 2023, and was streamed back to Earth via the cutting-edge laser tech on December 11. It was received by the Hale telescope at California’s Palomar observatory just 101 seconds later, then streamed to the JPL and played onsite in real-time.

“Despite transmitting from millions of miles away, it was able to send the video faster than most broadband internet connections,” says JPL electronics lead Ryan Rogalin, in a statement, adding that the Earth-based links were actually slower than the connection from deep space. “JPL’s DesignLab did an amazing job helping us showcase this technology. Everyone loves Taters.”

On a more science-y note, NASA’s broader Deep Space Optical Communications (DSOC) mission is designed to boost communications that reach further than the distance between Earth and the moon. Radio frequencies – which are typically used to communicate messages across large distances – struggle to handle the amount of data needed to transmit high-quality images and video from deep space, and optical, or laser-based, communications are thought to be a “key element” in meeting communication needs as humanity spreads among the cosmos.