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Talking to Pluto

posted by martyb on Tuesday February 03 2015, @04:55AM   Printer-friendly
from the this-is-no-Mickey-Mouse-operation dept.

tonyPick writes:

Emily Lakdawalla's blog on The Planetary Society has an article on the details of communicating with New Horizons.

Pluto is far away—very far away, more than 30 times Earth's distance from the Sun — so New Horizons' radio signal is weak. Weak signal means low data rates: at the moment, New Horizons can transmit at most 1 kilobit per second. (Note that spacecraft communications are typically measured in bits, not bytes; 1 kilobit is only 125 bytes.) Even at these low data rates, only the Deep Space Network's very largest, 70-meter dishes can detect New Horizons' faint signal.

The article goes into some of the tricks used to improve the data rates and keep within the spacecraft power budgets.

 
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  • (Score: 4, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 03 2015, @09:21AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 03 2015, @09:21AM (#140619)

    Given that the first phone modems had a rate of just 300 bits per second, 1kbps is already more than three times the data rate of the earliest modems.

    But I have to admit, sending images at such a data rate sucks. Maybe they should ask New Horizons to just describe what it sees; for texts, 1kbps is plentiful. ;-)

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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by sudo rm -rf on Tuesday February 03 2015, @10:52AM

    by sudo rm -rf (2357) on Tuesday February 03 2015, @10:52AM (#140631) Journal

    for texts, 1kbps is plentiful

    Now when I think of it, this is brilliant! Given all those auto-tagging algorithms and image analysis software this might actually work. On the other hand, New Horizons could also start sending ASCII art...

    • (Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Tuesday February 03 2015, @06:19PM

      by DeathMonkey (1380) on Tuesday February 03 2015, @06:19PM (#140781) Journal

      Now when I think of it, this is brilliant! Given all those auto-tagging algorithms and image analysis software this might actually work. On the other hand, New Horizons could also start sending ASCII art...
       
      I say we develope a clever algorithim to encode image data so that it can be sent via your text messaging service. We should call it UUEncode.