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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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Don't look back, the lemmings are gaining on you.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 04 2015, @05:11PM
I think it's because originally, the number of bits per second was the same as the baud value, which again is directly related to the physical frequency. That may also be the reason why it had always been measured with proper SI prefixes, even at a time when storage capacities were consistently measured in units of 1024.