| Title | Talking to Pluto | |
| Date | Tuesday February 03 2015, @04:55AM | |
| Author | martyb | |
| Topic | ||
| 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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printed from SoylentNews, Talking to Pluto on 2025-04-26 20:33:22