Earth just received a laser-beamed cat video from 19 million miles away

Cat videos have made it to the final frontier

NASA's Psyche mission began back in October, which has the aim of reaching an asteroid called 16 Psyche.

The asteroid is believed to have an absolute wealth of materials, including $10,000,000,000,000,000,000 worth of precious metals.

NASA's spacecraft is anticipated to reach the asteroid by 2029, when it will then go into orbit around the object.

Even though the ship isn't set to reach its destined goal for a good few years, the Psyche mission has already achieved something no man has done before.

A clip of ginger cat Taters has been laser-beamed from the spacecraft's current location of 19 million miles away.

The short video shows the cat playing on a sofa with, rather ironically, a laser pointer.

Taters, who is owned by one of the employees of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), was filmed back on Earth prior to the mission's launch.

Within just 101 seconds of the clip being sent, the JPL team received the signal at the Hale Telescope at Mount Palomar. To put this into perspective, the video of Taters got here more quickly than many of us receive information from our own broadband providers.

Pam Melroy, who works as NASA's Deputy Administrator, said: "This accomplishment underscores our commitment to advancing optical communications as a key element to meeting our future data transmission needs.

"Increasing our bandwidth is essential to achieving our future exploration and science goals, and we look forward to the continued advancement of this technology and the transformation of how we communicate during future interplanetary missions."