New Horizons: Pluto? Been there, done that – now for something 6.4 billion km away The Pluto-gawping New Horizons space probe is back in action and heading for a new target far out on the edges of the Solar System. New Horizons path To infinity and beyond! On Thursday the spacecraft's hydrazine-fueled thrusters were fired for 16 minutes at 1050 PT (1850 UTC) in the first of four maneuvers that will aim …
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Given the distance, and signal deterioration due to the magnetic fields and solar irradiation in between New Horizons and Earth, as well as (where the probe is currently travelling) the significantly higher-than-near-Earth amount of cosmic radiation, I find 1 kbps to be a pretty amazing achievement. Not to forget the constantly changing amount and speed of the charged particles of the Solar Wind, which is also detrimental to the type of WiFi being used here.
One might reciprocally conclude, as some other commentards have already noted but not spelled out as such, that rural England must be somewhere in the Kuiper Belt, rendering the entire effort having gone into the extended mission of New Horizons redundant. Just plonking down the probe somewhere in the Midlands should have done the job.
Pint of Proper Job, please...
It would be interesting to know how the NH data rate in relation to distance compares with older technologies such as that used on Voyager.
Voyager 1 is roughly four times the distance from us and still calling home. That investigation and comparison alone should warrant some funding to extend the mission.
The useful baud rate is 1kbps - or about 2Gbps of internet 'data'.
That doesn't make any sense.
Baud rate is always order of bps rate. The bps rate is not magically 6 orders of magnitude above (unless you are using millions of distinguishable values, which I rather doubt in this context)
Baud rate is the rate of symbols. This is not equal to bit rate in most situations, at the simplest, consider baudot code itself.
Then consider framing schemes, parity bits, start and perhaps stop bits, error-correction codes, the baud-rate is not the bit rate.
Take it a bit further, include, say, quadrature amplitude-and-phase shift keying, one 'bit' period in the stream carries 16 bits on arrival, minus those taken up by any framing scheme.
I earlier found a very irritating thread boosting the Raspberry Pi, the original post was semi-realistic (I do not believe that eleven-y-os are capable of what was described without significant help, maybe they did get it all from people they found through the WWW, and a Pi in a box, with all of the connectors is just a mini-PC), but there was a pile-on of morons claiming ludicrous feats by their *toddlers*, usually grandchilden, two and three y-os, all giving each other massive votes. Pathetic.
Say, I know a one y-o who already writes great code. Srsly want to believe it?
When I read the probe being referred to as a spacecraft my initial reaction was a kind of 'yeah, right'-smirk. Then I remembered that scene from 'Flight of the Phoenix' where Hardy Krüger explains to James Stewart that the size of the machine doesn't matter - what matters is that the engineering is done properly. Yes, it is a proper spacecraft, and it is going where no spacecraft has gone before, and it is amazing.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0059183/?ref_=fn_al_tt_4
about "maximum velocity of a sheep in a vacuum"
I'd assume that given enough energy the speed would be close to lightspeed. Now I do know (living surrounded by them ) that the average sheep is very unlikely to generate that amount of energy on it's own ( for a 40kg sheep at 99% lightspeed I estimate ~2.2E19 J)
Any farmers or relativists know different ?
I'm pretty sure the Reg calculator is wrong. Speed of light is about 3 x 10^8 metres per second, El Reg seems to think it's 3 x 10^6
Either that, or a sheep is limited to 1% of the speed of light - but I don't see any particular physical reason for that.
Either way, New Horizons is travelling at about 0.0048% of the speed of light.
"Thursday's burn changed the probe's speed by about 10 meters per second, and by the time the fourth is finished the probe will be going an extra 57 meters per second in the right direction.
That's not much, considering the probe is travelling at 52,304 kilometers per hour, or 0.4846 per cent of the maximum velocity of a sheep in a vacuum. Even so, its next trip will take four years and the probe will flash past 2014 MU69 on New Year's Day 2019, about the time most of us are getting over our hangovers."
57m/s may not be much, but it may be the difference between reaching the target and being about four and a half days late.
that they didn't have the chance to send NH past one of the larger bodies (than Pluto).
The one it will race past in a few years will probably look much like Kerberos, only less like two snowballs smashed together, and it will be even darker at that distance.
We humans really should get to work on getting outside LEO again, but with the radiation and zero-g problems, and problems on Earth, I doubt if I will live to see it, any more than, perhaps a base or bases on the Moon, a mission to an asteroid, Mars One may succeed in their suicidal plan, that would be interesting, too sad if they do not succeed, I do not think Mars One is going anywhere.
They may make a reality show of their recruitment process, that would turn a profit, although not as much as death on or on the way to Mars.
At least, Mir and the ISS have made a start on the zero-g problems, none of the cosmonauts have been blinded lately, but the one who was, when that problem was discovered, through his experience, probably does not like the result too much.
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