ESA's Mars Express picks up plaintive bleeps of China's Zhurong rover, adding much-needed comms redundancy

The European Space Agency (ESA) has confirmed that its Mars Express orbiter has heard from China's Zhurong rover. The experiment was to demonstrate that it was possible to relay data from Zhurong back to Earth via the veteran orbiter. In itself not unusual. However, while there is normally some handshaking to be done between …

[Lars]

It's all rather relative with speed

The first time I downloaded Linux at home with a 4800 baud flea market modem the speed was about half of that 8 kbytes.

It started when I went to work and had finished, to my surprise, when I got home.

Funny really, what is the speed of common sense in our speech and writing, could we, and never mind, it's Friday after all.

[thejoelr]

Re: It's all rather relative with speed

Positive about your baud vs bps? I had saved up for a 14.4kbps modem at that point, but only used it to download package updates when necessary. It started with SLES, I forget when that became stale and Slackware took over. I do remember driving to a college with my large number of 3.5" diskettes to grab the latest versions via their much faster connection. I was in HS, so I just tried to pretend like I belonged in the computer labs while also sticking out because I was loading up discs. If I needed updates, I had to call long distance to some BBS in Sunnyvale--which got me into loads of trouble until an actual ISP arrived. I was recently on vacation and my phone had to fall back on spotty 3G. It was enlightening how many things now expect a reliable high speed connection. I used to have better tools in place for that situation, but didn't know I would need to drag them out for vacation. I was lucky to grow up in that time. I miss some of the challenges faced on slower connections and what it also forced the internet to be. I used to be really into DTN and such. These days I'm attracted to nncpgo and detaching myself from the constant feed of internet.

[Kane]

...speeds started at relatively slow 8 kb per second, with a 128 kb per second the target.

Sounds like the inverse of my internet connection.

[Anonymous South African Coward]

feh, can remember the joys of having a 16k dedicated line for company emails... *shudder*

It worked, but I had to use a firewall to throttle and block any web browsing and other things devouring bandwidth.

[Paul Uszak]

Faster than Plusnet then...

[mark4155]

Faster than Sky also......form an orderly queue ladies and gents! Hey grandad at the back I said orderly!