To send and receive messages to and from the International Space Station (ISS), NASA has built the first end-to-end wired system that works both ways. With its 1.2 gigabits per second speed, which is faster than your home internet, it sent pictures and videos of cats, dogs, and even the occasional parrot to the astronauts who are currently on the station.

Space communication is slow for more than just the reason that light moves so slowly. It took over a year to send a few days’ worth of observations from missions like New Horizon, which was the first mission to Pluto. It will be possible for future missions to carry more instruments with better resolution, but that won’t help much if we can’t get the data back to Earth.

Lasers can make the speed at which data is sent much faster. A mission called Psyche is going to look into the metal-rich asteroid with the same name. It has an infrared laser system on board called Deep Space Optical Communications (DSOC). Last year, it was shown off from 40 million kilometers away, which is 16 million kilometers (10 million miles).

It took DSOC an extra month and 3 million kilometers to get to the important stuff. Of course, Psyche sent a video of Taters, a cat, chasing a laser dot.

But this only went one way. The video was put on Psyche before it opened. At the moment, there is no quick way to send that much data to a spacecraft so far away.

But the ISS is not like that. The mission operations center in Las Cruces, New Mexico, sent data to ground stations from Texas to Hawaii. The first set of data included pictures and videos of the staff’s pets. At these points, it was changed into infrared laser signals and sent into space.

As you might expect, the signals weren’t sent straight to the ISS. Instead, they were sent to satellites in geosynchronous orbits 22,000 miles above Earth. From there, everything was sent to a receiver that was temporarily attached to the outside of the ISS. All of those valuable bits were sent back to Earth, showing that the system works both ways.

We are used to information traveling at the speed of light, so this may not seem very impressive, but it was very hard to do technically. Radio waves can only carry so much data at a time. Infrared lasers can carry more data, but delays can cause important data to be lost over these distances, let alone the ones NASA wants to use these systems for in the future. A new “store-and-forward” process was put to the test during the demonstration. This process checks the quality of data and either sends it right away or stores it for later use.

A High-Rate Delay Tolerant Networking (HDTN) system was created so that this could happen four times faster than it could before. Astronauts on the Artemis Mission will need improvements like these so they can connect to the Internet instead of sending their videos in grainy black-and-white like Apollo astronauts did.

NASA’s Kevin Coggins said in a statement, “Not only did they show how these technologies can be an important part of NASA’s future science and exploration missions, but it was also fun for the teams to “imagine” their pets helping with this innovative demonstration.”

We commend NASA for the technology and the things they sent, but we can’t help but feel like they missed a chance. These pets belonged to astronauts Randy Bresnik, Christina Koch, and Kjell Lindgren, as well as to people who work for NASA but have never been to space. We especially like Astrid the Beagle because the breed is linked to scientific progress.

Still, none of these astronauts are on board right now. The current crew must miss their own pets and would have liked a video from whoever is taking care of them. Next, astronauts will face-time with their excited dogs (the cats won’t mind).