9 years ago
6
How NASA is (slowly) talking to the spacecraft snapping pictures of Pluto
The New Horizons spacecraft is using radio waves that transfer between 1,000 and 2,000 bits of data per second back to earth via radio waves. It can take 4.5 hours for the waves to get from Pluto 3 billion miles back to earth.
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Pluto and I must have the same ISP.
It's really unbelievable to me that New Horizons broadcasts at 10 watts of power and that we have the technology to hear that weak of a signal from that far away. Our average FM radio stations broadcast at 50,000 watts, and I sometimes have trouble getting them on my car's radio.
Well if there was nothing between your car and the radio station, you wouldn't have a problem either.
Edit: It seems the satellites they are using to communicate are on the Earth's surface, so there is atmosphere in the way. But still the dishes are pretty big compared to your car antenna.
Surely over that distance, there is plenty of loose rock etc flying through its path that could create noise in the data? I mean there are pretty big meteorites out there.
True. Surely it's less dense than buildings, trees and the fact that 50k watts doesn't mean much when you don't have line of sight (Earth curvature) which is, even with the some of the highest towers is only 63 miles.
Would be interesting to do the math on the density comparison though.
I don't know much about sending data over distance I just thought its crazy to need such low amount of power to do so from where it is :P
It probably only broadcasts its heartbeat back to earth with that 10 watts of power, at least that's my guess. Did it say anywhere in the article how its receive system works? I'd have to assume the array they're using to blast data all the way out to Pluto has some serious power and range behind it.