Using NASA’s first two-way, end-to-end laser relay system, pictures and videos of cherished pets flew through space over laser communications links at a rate of 1.2 gigabits per second—faster than most home internet speeds.

NASA astronauts Randy Bresnik, Christina Koch, and Kjell Lindgren, along with other agency employees, submitted photos and videos of their pets to take a trip to and from the International Space Station.

The transmissions allowed NASA’s SCaN (Space Communications and Navigation) program to showcase the power of laser communications while simultaneously testing out a new networking technique.

“The pet imagery campaign has been rewarding on multiple fronts for the ILLUMA-T, LCRD, and HDTN teams,” said Kevin Coggins, deputy associate administrator and SCaN program manager at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “Not only have they demonstrated how these technologies can play an essential role in enabling NASA’s future science and exploration missions, it also provided a fun opportunity for the teams to ‘picture’ their pets assisting with this innovative demonstration.”

This demonstration was inspired by “Taters the Cat”—an orange cat whose video was transmitted 19 million miles over laser links to the DSOC (Deep Space Optical Communications) payload on the Psyche mission. LCRD, DSOC, and ILLUMA-T are three of NASA’s ongoing laser communications demonstrations to prove out the technology’s viability.

The images and videos started on a computer at a mission operations center in Las Cruces, New Mexico. From there, NASA routed the data to optical ground stations in California and Hawaii. Teams modulated the data onto infrared light signals, or lasers, and sent the signals to NASA’s LCRD (Laser Communications Relay Demonstration) located 22,000 miles above Earth in geosynchronous orbit. LCRD then relayed the data to ILLUMA-T (Integrated LCRD Low Earth Orbit User Modem and Amplifier Terminal), a payload currently mounted on the outside of the space station.

Since the beginning of space exploration, NASA missions have relied on radio frequency communications to send data to and from space. Laser communications, also known as optical communications, employ infrared light instead of radio waves to send and receive information.

While both infrared and radio travel at the speed of light, infrared light can transfer more data in a single link, making it more efficient for science data transfer. This is due to infrared light‘s tighter wavelength, which can pack more information onto a signal than radio communications.

This demonstration also allowed NASA to test out another networking technique. When data is transmitted across thousands and even millions of miles in space, the delay and potential for disruption or data loss is significant. To overcome this, NASA developed a suite of communications networking protocols called Delay/Disruption Tolerant Networking, or DTN. The “store-and-forward” process used by DTN allows data to be forwarded as it is received or stored for future transmission if signals become disrupted in space.

To enable DTN at higher data rates, a team at NASA’s Glenn Research Center in Cleveland developed an advanced implementation, HDTN (High-Rate Delay Tolerant Networking). This networking technology acts as a high-speed path for moving data between spacecraft and across communication systems, enabling data transfer at a speed of up to four times faster than current DTN technology—allowing high-speed laser communication systems to utilize the “store-and-forward” capability of DTN.

The HDTN implementation aggregates data from a variety of different sources, like discoveries from the scientific instrumentation on the space station, and prepares the data for transmission back to Earth. For the pet photo and video experiment, the content was routed using DTN protocols as they traveled from Earth to LCRD, to ILLUMA-T on the space station. Once they arrived, an onboard HDTN payload demonstrated its ability to receive and reassemble the data into files.

This optimized implementation of DTN technology aims to enable a variety of communications services for NASA, from improving security through encryption and authentication to providing network routing of 4K high-definition multimedia and more. All of these capabilities are being tested on the space station with ILLUMA-T and LCRD.

As NASA’s Artemis campaign prepares to establish a sustainable presence on and around the moon, SCaN will continue to develop ground-breaking communications technology to bring the scalability, reliability, and performance of the Earth-based internet to space.

Virtual reality technology can do more than teach weaponry skills in law enforcement and military personnel, a new study suggests: It can accurately record shooting performance and reliably track individuals’ progress over time.

In the study of 30 people with a range of experience levels in handling a rifle, researchers at The Ohio State University found that a ballistic simulator captured data on the shooters’ accuracy, decision-making and reaction time—down to the millimeter in distance and millisecond in time—on a consistent basis.

In addition to confirming that the simulator—called the VirTra V-100—is a dependable research tool, the findings could lead to establishing the first-ever standardized performance scores for virtual reality ballistics training.

“To our knowledge, we’re the first team to answer the question of whether the simulator could be converted to an assessment tool and if it’s credible to use it day-to-day,” said Alex Buga, first author of the study and a Ph.D. student in kinesiology at Ohio State.

“We’ve figured out how to export the data and interpret it. We’ve focused on the three big challenges of marksmanship, decision-making and reaction time to measure 21 relevant variables—allowing us to put a report in a user’s hand and say, ‘This is how accurate, precise, focused and fast you are.'”

The study was published in the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research.

U.S. military leaders and law enforcement agencies have shown an interest in increasing the use of virtual reality for performance assessment, said Buga and senior study author Jeff Volek, professor of human sciences at Ohio State. Earlier this year, an Ohio Attorney General Task Force on the Future of Police Training in Ohio recommended incorporating virtual reality technology into training protocols.

Volek is the principal investigator on a project focused on improving the health of military service members, veterans and the American public. As part of that initiative, the research team is investigating the extent to which nutritional ketosis reduces detrimental effects of sleep loss on cognitive and physical performance in ROTC cadets—including their shooting ability as measured by the VirTra simulator. Verifying the simulator’s results for research purposes triggered the attempt to extract and analyze its data.

“We were using it as an outcome variable for research, and we found that it has very good day-to-day reproducibility of performance, which is crucial for research,” Volek said. “You want a sensitive and reproducible outcome in your test where there’s not a lot of device or equipment variation.”

Because the lab also focuses on human performance in first responders, researchers’ conversations with military and law enforcement communities convinced Buga that data collected by the simulator could be more broadly useful.

“I created a few programs that enabled us to calculate the shooting data and produce objective training measures,” he said. “This equipment is close to what the military and police use every day, so this has potential to be used as a screening tool across the country.”

Users of the simulator operate the infrared-guided M4 rifle by shooting at a large screen onto which different digitally generated visuals are projected—no headset required. The rifle at Ohio State has been retrofitted to produce the same recoil as a police or military weapon.

The study participants included civilians, police and SWAT officers, and ROTC cadets. Each was first familiarized in a single learning session with the simulator and then completed multiple rounds of three different tasks in each of three study performance sessions.

In the first task, participants fired at the same target a total of 50 times to produce measures of shooting precision. The decision-making assessment involved shooting twice within two seconds at designated shapes and colors on a screen displaying multiple shape and color choices. In the reaction-time scenario, participants shot at a series of plates from left to right as rapidly as possible.

Internal consistency ratings showed the simulator generated good to excellent test-retest agreement on the 21 variables measured.

All participants were well-rested and completed the study sessions at about the same time of day. Self-evaluations showed that participants’ overall confidence about their shooting performance increased from their first to final sessions. They also rated the simulator as a realistic and a low-stress shooting assessment tool.

The low stress and well-rested conditions were important to establishing baseline performance measures, the researchers noted, which then would enable evaluating how injuries and other physical demands of first-responder professions affect shooting performance.

“This simulator could be used to assess the effectiveness of specific training programs designed to improve shooting performance, or to evaluate marksmanship in response to various stressors encountered by the same law enforcement and military personnel,” Buga said. “These novel lines of evidence have enabled us to push the boundaries of tactical research and set the groundwork for using virtual reality in sophisticated training scenarios that support national defense goals.”

Additional co-authors, all from Ohio State, included Drew Decker, Bradley Robinson, Christopher Crabtree, Justen Stoner, Lucas Arce, Xavier El-Shazly, Madison Kackley, Teryn Sapper, John Paul Anders and William Kraemer.