Okay, I'm a sucker for geek stuff. This video is better quality than what a lot of us get from what passes for local broadband, but it was beamed from deep space. That's pretty cool. Via CBS News:

The 15-second cat video was sent to Earth as an experiment for NASA's Deep Space Optical Communications. The space agency hopes to one day stream very high-bandwidth video and other data from deep space, enabling future human missions beyond Earth's orbit.

While animals, including a cat named Félicette, have actually been to space, Taters is not one of them. A Jet Propulsion Laboratory employee owns the orange tabby, according to NASA.

The video of Taters chasing the red dot of a laser pointer was uploaded to NASA's $1.2 billion Psyche asteroid probe before it was launched in October. Psyche is on a six-year, 2.2-billion-mile voyage to a rare, metal-rich asteroid that may hold clues about how the cores of rocky planets like Earth first formed.

What does it all mean?

"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," Bill Klipstein, the tech demo's project manager at JPL, said. "But to make this significant event more memorable, we decided to work with designers at JPL to create a fun video, which captures the essence of the demo as part of the Psyche mission."

[...] A piece of equipment called a flight laser transceiver was used to beam the video as an encoded near-infrared laser from Psyche to the Hale Telescope at Caltech's Palomar Observatory in San Diego County, California, NASA said.

The record-setting transmission distance is about 80 times the distance between Earth and the moon and it took just 101 seconds for the laser to reach Earth, NASA said.

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.

And just to prove my point: "Despite transmitting from millions of miles away, it was able to send the video faster than most broadband internet connections," Ryan Rogalin, the project's receiver electronics lead at JPL, said. "In fact, after receiving the video at Palomar, it was sent to JPL over the internet, and that connection was slower than the signal coming from deep space."