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posted by
martyb
on Tuesday February 03 2015, @04:55AM
from the this-is-no-Mickey-Mouse-operation dept.
from the this-is-no-Mickey-Mouse-operation dept.
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: 3, Interesting) by bootsy on Tuesday February 03 2015, @01:35PM
I saw Vint Cert give a talk about this a few years ago as the USI conference in Paris.
http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2009-11/06/google-unveils-protocol-for-an-interplanetary-internet.aspx [wired.co.uk]
Sounds like it would come in useful here if they are not using something similar already.